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.
Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
Dr. King’s Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
I don’t think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups – a ‘Faces of America 2.’
Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same.
The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.