“ 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, as I like t… Henry Louis Gates
“ 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
“ My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults. Henry Louis Gates
“ 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
“ 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 discri… Henry Louis Gates
“ 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
“ 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 b… Henry Louis Gates
“ 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
“ The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched. Henry Louis Gates
“ 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… Henry Louis Gates
“ The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up. Henry Louis Gates
“ Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civiliza… Henry Louis Gates
“ 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… Henry Louis Gates
“ So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. Henry Louis Gates
“ 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
“ 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
“ 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 th… Henry Louis Gates
