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.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Dr. King’s Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I don’t think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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.’

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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 Jr.

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating ‘Lincoln the myth.’ He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man’s president.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.
About Stories

Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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 Jr.

It’s very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you’re the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You’d get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I’ve heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.
About Stories

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room – and we have to become sensitive to it.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I didn’t feel particularly close to my father.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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