Quotes by 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

Wisdom

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

Love

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

— Henry Louis Gates

Truth

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

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

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.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ice hockey...' - and then I used to say 'golf,' but Tiger took over golf! - 'and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.'

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

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

Courage

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

Wisdom

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

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

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

— Henry Louis Gates

Wisdom

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

Education