Henry Louis Gates Quotes
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My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.
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If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.
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The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
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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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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.
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I have no plans to slow down.
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The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
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Precisely that, covering 500 years of African-American history in six hours. I've been working on this for seven years. The biggest challenge was deciding which stories to tell.
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Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
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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.
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The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
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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.
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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.
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In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
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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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What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.
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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.
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The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.
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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.
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It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
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So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.
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Like the amazing story of Anthony Johnson. This man was a slave, then became free, accumulated 250 acres, and even had his own slave, a black man who took him to court in Virginia in 1654.That man argued that he should be freed like an indentured servant. But Johnson, who we believe was a pure African from Angola, said, "No way, you're my slave." And the court agreed.
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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.
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I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.