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Henry Louis Gates Quotes


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Quotes by Henry Louis Gates

Showing 61-70 of 105 Quotes by Henry Louis Gates

The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them.

~Henry Louis Gates

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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.

~Henry Louis Gates

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Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

~Henry Louis Gates

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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.

~Henry Louis Gates

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You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

~Henry Louis Gates

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So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

~Henry Louis Gates

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I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

~Henry Louis Gates

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I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'

~Henry Louis Gates

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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

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There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

~Henry Louis Gates

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Critic

Born: September 16th, 1950

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