American - Critic | September 16, 1950 -
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
Henry Louis Gates
FatherMotherI AmMeEverythingAm
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.
FamilyTreeRootsShipYouEnvy
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
Black And WhiteDiversityBlackWhite
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?
MarriageTruthSadChildrenSchool
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?
GreatDayWarMindFaceThink
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.
FearLeaderHatePeopleBlameLook
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.
GodSoulMeMomRestName
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
TruthHistoryTruth IsBlackYouUp
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.
FamilyThinkYouReunionDNAMean
The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike.
BlackWhiteAfricaReasonMaster
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.
BusinessTruthSadWorldImpossible
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.
RacismPeopleRootsThinkYouWell
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Henry Louis Gates quotes