Henry Louis Gates

“We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.”

“Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.”

“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.”

“The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.”

“Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.”

“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.”

“Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.”

“You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know?”

“It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that.”