3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Henry Louis Gates Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They’ll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Henry Louis Gates So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Henry Louis Gates 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Henry Louis Gates My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents… They treated us like adults.
3 December 2020 Henry Louis Gates I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as ‘Tarzan.’
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Henry Louis Gates The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
3 December 2020 Henry Louis Gates 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.
