Henry Louis Gates Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.
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The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
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Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
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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.
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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.
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When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.
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I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
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Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
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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. 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.
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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.
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For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose.
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There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months.
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One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
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You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.
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My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.
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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.
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I try to be sensitive, but the atmosphere I create is very supportive. One overriding premise of the series is that guilt is not heritable. It's good to know about them, but you are not responsible for them. You don't have to apologize for them. It's a process of knowing, and the more you know, the richer the sense of yourself. The firmer your foundation as a human being is
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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.
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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.
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My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.
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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.
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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.