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We Have Chaos Reigning In The Middle East. There Is A Great Deal Of Instability. In The Past, People Would Have Turned To Their Church, And Some Still Do. Counterintuitively, People Are Now Turning Into Themselves To Find Their Roots. The Way You Do That Is Through Your Family Tree. "where Did I Come From?" There Is An Urge To Preserve The Names Of The People Who Produced You.

-Henry Louis Gates

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We Have Chaos Reigning

Henry Louis Gates

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We Have Chaos Reigning In The Middle East. There Is A Great Deal Of Instability. In The Past, People Would Have Turned To Their Church, And Some Still Do. Counterintuitively, People Are Now Turning Into Themselves To Find Their Roots. The Way You Do That Is Through Your Family Tree. "where Did I Come From?" There Is An Urge To Preserve The Names Of The People Who Produced You.

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African American

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I'd Say Imagine That You Wake Up One Morning When You're Going Through A Midlife Crisis. You're Getting Divorced. Your Kids Won't Speak To You. Their Faces Are Covered With Acne, And You Have To Decide Why You Should Get Out Of Bed. That's The Career You Should Pick. The One That Keeps You Going No Matter What, Even If Your Life Is Falling Apart. That's How I Feel About My Career.

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The Genius Is Making A Way Out Of No Way.

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Wherever You Go In The History Of America, There Have Been Black People Making Contributions, But Their Contributions Have Been Obscured, Lost, Buried.

We Can See That The Complexity We Witness Inside The African-american Community Today Has Always Been There. Black People Were Just As Noble And Just As Ignoble As Anybody Else.

African American

Our Society Is Driven Today By So Much Ethnic Discord. We Have Black Lives Matter, Which I Praise And Celebrate. We Have The Demagogues Stereotyping Muslims And Resurrecting Racist Stereotypes They Used To Visit On Us. The Larger Goal Is To Show That We Are All The Same, We All Come From Africa, And We All Have The Same Larger Family Tree. It's About The Fundamental Unity Of The Human Community.

In America One Drop Of Black Ancestry Makes You Black. In Brazil, It's Almost As If One Drop Of White Ancestry Makes You White.

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.

You Have A Diasporic Black World, And The Only Way To Put It Back Together Again Is Symbolic. It's Like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever Could Edit The 'encyclopedia Africana' Would Provide Symbolic Order To The Fragments Created Over The Past 500 Years. That Is A Major Contribution.

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 To Put It, And Find The Tribe Or Ethnic Group That I Was From In Africa.

Ever Since I Watched 'roots,' I've Dreamed Of Tracing My African Ancestry And Helping Other People Do The Same.

The Bottom Line Is That Wanda Sykes Has The Longest Continuously Documented Family Tree Of Any African-american We Have Ever Researched.

African American

My Father Was The Funniest Man I Ever Met. He Made Redd Foxx Look Like An Undertaker.

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.

African American

Politicians Will Not Put Forth Programs Aimed At The Problems Of Poor Blacks While Their Turnout Remains So Low.

In A One-hour Documentary, You Can Tell Maybe Ten Stories. That's How The Documentary Is Structured. I Wrote To Forty Of The Greatest Historians Of Both African And African-american History, And Hired Them As Consultants. I Had Them Submit What They Thought Were The Indispensable Stories, The Ones They Felt This Series Absolutely Had To Include.

African American

Instill Respect For Teachers.

I Knew That There Were Black People In Africa, Of Course, Unfortunately Because Of Movies Such As 'tarzan.'

So, Mexico, Brazil, They Wanted Their National Culture To Be 'blackish' - Really Brown, A Beautiful Brown Blend. And Finally, I Discovered That In Each Of These Societies The People At The Bottom Are The Darkest Skinned With The Most African Features.

All Of The Guests On 'faces Of America' Were Deeply Moved By What We Revealed About Their Ancestry. We Were Able To Trace The Ancestry Of Native American Writer Louise Erdrich Back To 438 A.d. We Found That Queen Noor Is Descended From Royalty, And That's Before She Married King Hussein Of Jordan.

Native American

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.

The First Slave Came To Florida In 1526. The First One We Know By Name, Esteban, Which Means Stephen, Came A Couple Of Years Later. So, We Start With The Stories Of Juan Garrido And Esteban To Show That African-american People Have Been Here A Century Longer Than Anyone Thought, And That The Diversity We See In The African-american Community Today Has Existed Since The Beginning.

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.

So, The Kind Of Precious Memories About Being Black For My Generation Won't Exist For My Kids' And Grandkids' Generations Unless We Preserve Them Through Fiction, Through Film, Through Comic Books, And Every Other Form Of Media We Can Possibly Utilize To Perpetuate The Story Of The Great African-american People.

Insofar As We, Critics Of The Black Tradition, Master Our Craft, We Serve Both To Preserve Our Own Traditions And To Shape Their Direction. All Great Writers Demand Great Critics.

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.'

My Brother And I Had A Really Privileged Relationship With My Parents... They Treated Us Like Adults.

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.

America Is The Greatest Nation Ever Founded. The Ideals Are The Greatest Ever Espoused In Human History, And We Just Need The Country To Live Up To Them. But What I Worry About Are The 1 Million Black Men In The Prison System.

If Martin Luther King Came Back, He'd Say We Need Another Civil Rights Movement Built On Class Not Race.

For As Long As I Can Remember, I Have Been Passionately Intrigued By 'africa,' By The Word Itself, By Its Flora And Fauna, Its Topographical Diversity And Grandeur; But Above All Else, By The Sheer Variety Of The Colors Of Its People, From Tan And Sepia To Jet And Ebony.

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.

Everybody Wants To Have Sex - You Don't Have To Have A Baby When You're 16. You Don't Have To Do Drugs. I Think Our Sunday Schools Should Be Turned Into Black History Schools And Computer Schools On The Weekend, Just Like Hebrew Schools For Jewish People, Or My Asian Friends Who Send Their Kids To Schools On The Weekend To Learn Chinese Or Korean.

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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.

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I Believe In The Law. I Think We Have A Great System Of Justice. But I Do Think That System Of Justice Has Been Corrupted By Racism And Classism. I Think It's Difficult For 'poor People' - Poor White People, Brown People - To Be Treated Fairly Before The Law In The Same Way That Upper-class People Are.

I Think That Is What We Do By Preserving And Telling Our Stories. If You Don't Tell Your Stories, Other People Will Tell Their Story About You. It's Important That We Nurture And Protect These Memories. Things Change. Existence Means Change. So, The Kind Of Precious Memories About Being Black For My Generation Won't Exist For My Kids' And Grandkids' Generations Unless We Preserve Them Through Fiction, Through Film, Through Comic Books, And Every Other Form Of Media We Can Possibly Utilize To Perpetuate The Story Of The Great African-american People.

In 1957, When I Was In Second Grade, Black Children Integrated Central High School In Little Rock, Arkansas. We Watched It On Tv. All Of Us Watched It. I Don't Mean Mama And Daddy And Rocky. I Mean All The Colored People In America Watched It, Together, With One Set Of Eyes.

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.

I Find That People Today Tend To Use Them Interchangeably. I Use African-american, Because I Teach African Studies As Well As African-american Studies, So It's Easy, Neat And Convenient. But Sometimes, When You're In A Barber Shop, Somebody'll Say, "did You See What That Negro Did?" A Lot Of People Slip In And Out Of Different Terms Effortlessly, And I Don't Think The Thought Police Should Be On Patrol.

African American

What Happened In The Interim Is, Billions Of Records Have Been Digitized. Historians And Scholars Have Always Used Genealogical Records To Tell The Story Of American History. It Takes Months And Years Of Research. I Can't Even Tell You How Laborious That Is. You Have To Be Somebody Who Has A Lot Of Free Time, Like A Professor Who Can Take Tenure Or Someone With A Great Deal Of Leisure.

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.

When Europeans Came Upon Real Ruined Cities They Refused To Believe That They Had Been Built By Africans. Here The Past Has Been Distorted And Denied.

If You Don't Tell Your Stories, Other People Will Tell Their Story About You. It's Important That We Nurture And Protect These Memories. Things Change. Existence Means Change.

There's A Boom In Genealogy Now. With Ancestry.com And Other Sites Digitizing So Many Of The Records, You Can Now Find Things In A Few Minutes That Used To Take Months.

Lincoln Would Love The Fact That Obama Is Such A Great Conciliator, Trying To Transcend Ideology.

No White Racist Makes You Get Pregnant When You Are A Black Teenager.

I Try To Be Sensitive, But The Atmosphere I Create Is Very Supportive. One Overriding Premise Of The Series Is That Guilt Is Not Heritable. It's Good To Know About Them, But You Are Not Responsible For Them. You Don't Have To Apologize For Them. It's A Process Of Knowing, And The More You Know, The Richer The Sense Of Yourself. The Firmer Your Foundation As A Human Being Is

Diversity Doesn't Mean Black And White Only.

Black And White

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.

For Me, A Garden Is Peace Of Mind. It Immediately Takes My Mind Off The Thing I'm Puzzling About In My Work And Gives Me Repose.

Each Individual Has A Responsibility To Get Out Of Bed, Learn Their Abcs, Learn Your Math Tables, Not Use Race And Racism As An Excuse.

It Turns Out One Of My Ancestors Fought In The Continental Army, So I Was Inducted Into The Sons Of The American Revolution.

One Must Learn How To Be Black In America.

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Raymond Queneau

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