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 s...”

“I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I w...”

“Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.”

“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.”

“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, a...”

“The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodis...”

“I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.”

“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 comple...”

“So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.”

“Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.”

“It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.”

“In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.”

“Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.”

“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.”

“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....”

“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 an...”

“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...”

“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 tend...”

“People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; fr...”

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