Henry Louis Gates Quotes & Sayings

I think literacy is everything. — Henry Louis Gates

I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. — Henry Louis Gates

Mama and I would go to a funeral and she'd stand up to read the dead person's eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh. — Henry Louis Gates

It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed. — Henry Louis Gates

I got a letter from this lady of Russian and Jewish descent. She asked me if I was a racist because I didn't do any White people. [laughter] I was shocked, because my mandate is to do Black studies. It would have never occurred to me if this lady hadn't written this letter. We decided we were going expand the brand and do everybody. — Henry Louis Gates

All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan. — Henry Louis Gates

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again. — Henry Louis Gates

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. — Henry Louis Gates

A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am. — Henry Louis Gates

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art. — Henry Louis Gates

We have chaos reigning in the Middle East. There is a great deal of instability. In the past, people would have turned to their church, and some still do. Counterintuitively, people are now turning into themselves to find their roots. The way you do that is through your family tree. "Where did I come from?" There is an urge to preserve the names of the people who produced you. — Henry Louis Gates

So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. — Henry Louis Gates

Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans. — Henry Louis Gates

I didn't feel particularly close to my father. — Henry Louis Gates

My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip. — Henry Louis Gates

It's fascinating how life works. — Henry Louis Gates

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community. — Henry Louis Gates

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves. — Henry Louis Gates

Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. — Henry Louis Gates

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks - where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother. — Henry Louis Gates

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti. — Henry Louis Gates

Instill respect for teachers. — Henry Louis Gates

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism. — Henry Louis Gates

Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping Muslims and resurrecting racist stereotypes they used to visit on us. The larger goal is to show that we are all the same, we all come from Africa, and we all have the same larger family tree. It's about the fundamental unity of the human community. — Henry Louis Gates

People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances. — Henry Louis Gates

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics. — Henry Louis Gates

Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer. — Henry Louis Gates

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to ... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa. — Henry Louis Gates

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. — Henry Louis Gates

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity ... And here, most of the saints are black. — Henry Louis Gates

We have to stop making excuses. One of the things that I'm careful to show is the horrendous effects of institutional and structural racism, but in the end, you can't wait for white man or a Black man to come riding in on a white horse to save you. We have to save ourselves, and that's the lesson of "The African Americans." — Henry Louis Gates

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. — Henry Louis Gates

I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? — Henry Louis Gates

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched. — Henry Louis Gates

The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere. — Henry Louis Gates

An impressively researched and documented collection of the finest thought produced by writers throughout the African Diaspora. A magnificent achievement. — Henry Louis Gates

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned into Black history schools and computer schools on the weekend, just like Hebrew schools for Jewish people, or my Asian friends who send their kids to schools on the weekend to learn Chinese or Korean. — Henry Louis Gates

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. — Henry Louis Gates

It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. — Henry Louis Gates

The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. Well, guess what? The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free! This brother was a conquistador who came with Ponce de Leon. He was looking for the Fountain of Youth just like the white people were. — Henry Louis Gates

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. — Henry Louis Gates

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only. — Henry Louis Gates

What happened in the interim is, billions of records have been digitized. Historians and scholars have always used genealogical records to tell the story of American history. It takes months and years of research. I can't even tell you how laborious that is. You have to be somebody who has a lot of free time, like a professor who can take tenure or someone with a great deal of leisure. — Henry Louis Gates

People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety. — Henry Louis Gates

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. — Henry Louis Gates

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery. — Henry Louis Gates

Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. — Henry Louis Gates

Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President. — Henry Louis Gates

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are. — Henry Louis Gates

Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology. — Henry Louis Gates

Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth? — Henry Louis Gates

I have no plans to slow down. — Henry Louis Gates

My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker. — Henry Louis Gates

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality ... the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats. — Henry Louis Gates

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro. — Henry Louis Gates

Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have ... This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down. — Henry Louis Gates

I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too. — Henry Louis Gates

I'd say imagine that you wake up one morning when you're going through a midlife crisis. You're getting divorced. Your kids won't speak to you. Their faces are covered with acne, and you have to decide why you should get out of bed. That's the career you should pick. The one that keeps you going no matter what, even if your life is falling apart. That's how I feel about my career. — Henry Louis Gates

The truth is I would do my job for free! I love it every day. If you can possibly choose a vocation that's an avocation, a job that's really a hobby, then you'll be way ahead of the game. You should not pick an occupation because your think your parents want you to do it, or because you think it's the noble thing to do. You should only pick a job because it turns you on. — Henry Louis Gates

In the old days, you lived in one neighborhood, you knew all your neighbors and your daughter married the guy next door. That was social and economic progress. That model is gone now. We also had a world order that was fraught but fairly stable. — Henry Louis Gates

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. — Henry Louis Gates

There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. — Henry Louis Gates

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it. — Henry Louis Gates

If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race. — Henry Louis Gates

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and ... Wanda Sykes and John Legend ... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship. — Henry Louis Gates

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography. — Henry Louis Gates

I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, "Did you see what that Negro did?" A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol. — Henry Louis Gates

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not. — Henry Louis Gates

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment. — Henry Louis Gates

Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low. — Henry Louis Gates

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. — Henry Louis Gates

Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world. — Henry Louis Gates

No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands. — Henry Louis Gates

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system. — Henry Louis Gates

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced. — Henry Louis Gates

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. — Henry Louis Gates

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race. — Henry Louis Gates

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution. — Henry Louis Gates

The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. — Henry Louis Gates

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it. — Henry Louis Gates

Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse. — Henry Louis Gates

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred. — Henry Louis Gates

My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black. — Henry Louis Gates

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. — Henry Louis Gates

My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents ... They treated us like adults. — Henry Louis Gates

The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them. — Henry Louis Gates

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? — Henry Louis Gates

For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty. — Henry Louis Gates

First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager. — Henry Louis Gates

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system. — Henry Louis Gates

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried. — Henry Louis Gates

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large. — Henry Louis Gates

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity. — Henry Louis Gates

Very few Black people ever embraced back to Africa movements, and very few actually, a tiny number actually went back to Africa. They said, "We are going to make America live up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States." They produced one of the world's great cultures; they produced individuals who were just as brilliant and made contributions to the world civilization. In fact, they produced a world-class civilization, the African American civilization, in music, in dance, in oratory, in religion, in writing. — Henry Louis Gates

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree. — Henry Louis Gates

We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA. — Henry Louis Gates

The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike. — Henry Louis Gates

I'm a tech geek. — Henry Louis Gates

I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black? — Henry Louis Gates

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.' — Henry Louis Gates