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. – Henry Louis Gates
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
When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied. – Henry Louis Gates
I’m a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black? – Henry Louis Gates
I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups – a ‘Faces of America 2.’ – Henry Louis Gates
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. – Henry Louis Gates
It’s no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people. – 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
Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same. – Henry Louis Gates
What’s fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. – 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. – Henry Louis Gates
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
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
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
Dr. King’s Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. – Henry Louis Gates
Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system. – Henry Louis Gates
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up. – Henry Louis Gates
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
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. – Henry Louis Gates
It’s very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you’re the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You’d get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed. – Henry Louis Gates
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
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
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
My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker. – Henry Louis Gates
The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. – Henry Louis Gates
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