Henry Louis Gates Quotes

A collection of quotes by Henry Louis Gates.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., also known as Skip Gates, is an American literary critic, educator, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia. Throughout his career, Gates has made significant contributions to African American studies and has played a crucial role in promoting a broader understanding of African American history and culture.

Gates has been a prominent figure in academia, currently serving as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. With a deep passion for literature, Gates is widely recognized for his literary criticism and scholarship, particularly his exploration of African American literature.

As a renowned documentarian and filmmaker, Gates has produced and hosted several groundbreaking television series, including "Finding Your Roots" and "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross." Through his documentaries, he has shed light on the often untold stories of African American achievements, struggles, and resilience.

Gates' works have received numerous awards and accolades, including numerous Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. He has authored many books, including "The Signifying Monkey" and "Life Upon These Shores," which explore African American literature, history, and culture.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is widely regarded as a leading scholar and cultural figure, amplifying the voices and experiences of African Americans through his multifaceted career as an educator, historian, critic, and filmmaker.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related

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.

Henry Louis Gates


The thing about black history is that the truth is so much m

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

Henry Louis Gates


The only people who live in a post-black world are four peop

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

Henry Louis Gates

Hope

My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb

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.

Henry Louis Gates

Mom

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tr

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

Henry Louis Gates

Family

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle cl

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

Henry Louis Gates

Success

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related

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.

Henry Louis Gates

Family

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When y

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

Best

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obam

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

History

There are just so many stories that are buried on family tre

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.

Henry Louis Gates

Family

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Henry Louis Gates

Art

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers,

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 complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

Henry Louis Gates

Experience

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their f

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

Future

People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pi

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.

Henry Louis Gates

Fear

So many people of color who made major contributions to Amer

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

Henry Louis Gates

History

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa an

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

Family

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and bl

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.

Henry Louis Gates

Attitude

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirma

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.

Henry Louis Gates

Success

I first learned that there were black people living in some

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

Age

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, bl

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

Positive