Henry Louis Gates Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von 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.

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

Henry Louis Gates

I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.

Henry Louis Gates

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

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.'

Henry Louis Gates

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.

Henry Louis Gates

It's fascinating how life works.

Henry Louis Gates

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.

Henry Louis Gates

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

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

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

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

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

Henry Louis Gates

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.

Henry Louis Gates

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Henry Louis Gates

Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

I'm a tech geek.

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

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Henry Louis Gates

I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.

Henry Louis Gates

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.

Henry Louis Gates

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

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

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations.

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

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

Henry Louis Gates

Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

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.

Henry Louis Gates

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.

Henry Louis Gates