104 Quotes by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Diversity doesn’t mean black and white only.

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

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

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.

I’m a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?

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

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.’

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.

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.