My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.
I’m looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth – more than any other American President.
Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.
My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I’ve got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.
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.
What’s fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian’s footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.
Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It’s so different but it’s so similar to the United States, to Miami. It’s like a doppelgaenger. It’s the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.
I’m a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?
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.
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
I have no plans to slow down.
Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
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.
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.
First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look – no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
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.