List of Henry Louis Gates Quotes

What Happened In The Interim Is, Billions Of Records Have Been Digitized. Historians And Scholars Have Always Used Genealogical Records To Tell The Story Of American History. It Takes Months And Years Of Research. I Can't Even Tell You How Laborious That Is. You Have To Be Somebody Who Has A Lot Of Free Time, Like A Professor Who Can Take Tenure Or Someone With A Great Deal Of Leisure.

Thousand Years Ago, We All Descended From Africans Who Left The Continent. Those Ancestors, We Will Never Know Their Name. We Can Go Back 200 Or 300 Years And Actually Populate Your Family Tree With Real People Who Had Names And Documents. They Had Customs, Characteristics That, Unbeknownst To You, You Have Inherited. Almost Through Osmosis It Has Been Passed Down To You.

We Have Chaos Reigning In The Middle East. There Is A Great Deal Of Instability. In The Past, People Would Have Turned To Their Church, And Some Still Do. Counterintuitively, People Are Now Turning Into Themselves To Find Their Roots. The Way You Do That Is Through Your Family Tree. "where Did I Come From?" There Is An Urge To Preserve The Names Of The People Who Produced You.

The Second Thing That Happened Is, Dna Analysis Is Much More Sophisticated. All You Have To Do Now Is Spit In A Test Tube And You Find Out All Kind Of Things In Six Weeks - Where They Are From In Africa Or Europe. You Can Prove Or Disprove The Fundamental African-american Myth That You Descended From A Cherokee Great, Great Grandmother.

Each Individual Has A Responsibility To Get Out Of Bed, Learn Their Abcs, Learn Your Math Tables, Not Use Race And Racism As An Excuse.

Everybody Wants To Have Sex - You Don't Have To Have A Baby When You're 16. You Don't Have To Do Drugs. I Think Our Sunday Schools Should Be Turned Into Black History Schools And Computer Schools On The Weekend, Just Like Hebrew Schools For Jewish People, Or My Asian Friends Who Send Their Kids To Schools On The Weekend To Learn Chinese Or Korean.

That's What I Mean By Being Bilingual: Comfortable In Your Skin, Comfortable With All Parts Of Who You Are.

Ending The Slave Trade Was Contrary To British Economic Interests. For All Its Limitations And Hypocrisies - British Slavery Itself, Of Course, Still Continued To Exist - I Still Think It Was A Great Moment In Human History.

I'd Say Imagine That You Wake Up One Morning When You're Going Through A Midlife Crisis. You're Getting Divorced. Your Kids Won't Speak To You. Their Faces Are Covered With Acne, And You Have To Decide Why You Should Get Out Of Bed. That's The Career You Should Pick. The One That Keeps You Going No Matter What, Even If Your Life Is Falling Apart. That's How I Feel About My Career.

No White Racist Makes You Get Pregnant When You Are A Black Teenager.

We Really Invented The Genre Of Tracing Family Trees And Going Back As Far As We Could On The Paper Trail. When The Paper Trail Disappeared, We Used Dna Analysis. The Technology Was Just Being Invented That Allowed You To Trace Ancestry Through Dna.

I Got A Letter From This Lady Of Russian And Jewish Descent. She Asked Me If I Was A Racist Because I Didn't Do Any White People. I Was Shocked, Because My Mandate Is To Do Black Studies. It Would Have Never Occurred To Me If This Lady Hadn't Written This Letter. We Decided We Were Going Expand The Brand And Do Everybody.