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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

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Well, Certainly One Of

Henry Louis Gates

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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.

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Dr. King's Nobel Prize Had A More Powerful Transforming Effect On Him Than I Think He Realized At The Time.

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.

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.

Conspiracy Theories Are An Irresistible Labor-saving Device In The Face Of Complexity.

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.'

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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.

No One Thinks Of Mexico And Peru As Black. But Mexico And Peru Together Got 700,000 Africans In The Slave Trade. The Coast Of Acapulco Was A Black City In The 1870s. And The Veracruz Coast On The Gulf Of Mexico And The Costa Chica, South Of Acapulco Are Traditional Black Lands.

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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.

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.

The African American's Relationship To Africa Has Long Been Ambivalent, At Least Since The Early Nineteenth Century, When 3,000 Black Men Crowded Into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church In Philadelphia To Protest Noisily A Plan To Recolonize Free Blacks In Africa.

It Is The Black Poet Who Bridges The Gap In Tradition, Who Modifies Tradition When Experience Demands It, Who Translates Experience Into Meaning And Meaning Into Belief.

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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.

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

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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 Civilizations, Which In Their Day, Were Just As Splendid And Glorious As Any On The Face Of The Earth?

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You Can Find Virtually Everybody Black Back As Far As The 1870 Census. Why 1870? That's When The Ex-slaves First Have Surnames. But If You Find Your Great-great-grandfather In 1870 And It Says He's 50, That Means He Was Born In 1820 And You're Back To 1820 Already. For An American That's Pretty Damned Good, You Know?

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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.

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You Had One Guy Who Was A Slave, And Another Who Wasn't. And I Actually Know What Happened To Them. [juan ] Garrido Ended Up Getting Good Jobs And A Pension In Mexico Which Was The Center Of New Spain, As It Was Called. Esteban Ended Up Being Killed By The Zuni Indians.

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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.

You Should Not Pick An Occupation Because Your Think Your Parents Want You To Do It, Or Because You Think It's The Noble Thing To Do. You Should Only Pick A Job Because It Turns You On.

Remember, I Have A Ph.d. In English Literature.

English Literature

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.

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.

You Notice Patterns. White Guests Often Are Mortified - That Word Again - When They Learn Their Ancestors Owned Slaves. But I've Never Had A Black Guest Who Was Upset To Learn About White Ancestry That Probably Involved Forced Sexual Relations.

I Want To Be A Figure For Prison Reform. I Think That The Criminal Justice System Is Rotten.

In Fact, The Class Divide In The Black Community Is Now Seen By Some As A Permanent Aspect Of Our Existence.

If America Has A Civic Religion, The First Amendment Is Its Central Article Of Faith.

I Got A Letter From This Lady Of Russian And Jewish Descent. She Asked Me If I Was A Racist Because I Didn't Do Any White People. I Was Shocked, Because My Mandate Is To Do Black Studies. It Would Have Never Occurred To Me If This Lady Hadn't Written This Letter. We Decided We Were Going Expand The Brand And Do Everybody.

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.

The Right Insists That Anyone Can Escape Poverty By Working Hard But That Is Simply Not The Case.

Patriotism Is Best Exemplified Through Auto-critique.

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.

The Precise Form Of An Individual's Activity Is Determined, Of Course, By The Equipment With Which He Came Into The World. In Other Words, It Is Determined By His Heredity.

I Thought, "why Don't We Be Innovative And Create Something Nobody Had Ever Done Before?" It Was A Huge Hit And We Immediately Did A Sequel With Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner And Maya Angelou.

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.

I Didn't Feel Particularly Close To My Father.

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.

The Only People Who Live In A Post-black World Are Four People Who Live In A Little White House On Pennsylvania Avenue. The Idea That America Is Post-racial Or Post-black Because A Man I Admire, Barack Obama, Is President Of The United States, Is A Joke. And I Hope No One Will Even Wonder About This Crazy Fiction Again.

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

I Rebel At The Notion That I Can't Be Part Of Other Groups, That I Can't Construct Identities Through Elective Affinity, That Race Must Be The Most Important Thing About Me. Is That What I Want On My Gravestone: Here Lies An African American?

African American

People Don't Realize What A Brilliant Politician Lincoln Was. Looking Back, We Want To Ascribe A Level Of Providence To His Every Decision But He Was A Cunning And Calculating Politician; From The Cultivation Of His Image As A Hayseed From Illinois, To His Ability To Keep This Country Together Under Dire Circumstances.

The Dominican Republic Says 'we're Black Behind The Ears.' And In Mexico, 'there's A Black Grandma In The Closet.' They Know, They've Just Been Intermarrying For A Long Time. But If We Did The Dna Of Everyone In Mexico A Whole Lot Of People Would Have A Whole Lot Of Black In Them.

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.

Censorship Is To Art As Lynching Is To Justice.

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

The Sad Truth Is That The Civil Rights Movement Cannot Be Reborn Until We Identify The Causes Of Black Suffering, Some Of Them Self-inflicted. Why Can't Black Leaders Organize Rallies Around Responsible Sexuality, Birth Within Marriage, Parents Reading To Their Children And Students Staying In School And Doing Homework?

Like The Amazing Story Of Anthony Johnson. This Man Was A Slave, Then Became Free, Accumulated 250 Acres, And Even Had His Own Slave, A Black Man Who Took Him To Court In Virginia In 1654.that Man Argued That He Should Be Freed Like An Indentured Servant. But Johnson, Who We Believe Was A Pure African From Angola, Said, "no Way, You're My Slave." And The Court Agreed.

I'm Looking Forward To The Time When We All Look Like Polynesians.

Looking Forward

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.

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.

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

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 Boy About My Age, He Wanted To Be An Episcopal Priest, Because He So Admired His Priest, A Black Man From Someplace Called Haiti.

The First Step Toward Tolerance Is Respect And The First Step Toward Respect Is Knowledge.

My Grandfather Was Coloured, My Father Was Negro, And I Am Black.

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.

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.

What's Fascinated Me From The Time I Was A Little Kid Was The Way We Construct Our Lives Through Stories.

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.

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.

Instill Respect For Teachers.

The Biggest Surprise For Me, Without A Doubt, Was That The First Black People Who Came To The United States Weren't The 20 Who Arrived In Jamestown In 1619. All Of Us Had Been Taught That. Well, Guess What? The First African Came To Florida In 1513. And The Huge Shock Is We Know His Name, Juan Garrido, And That He Wasn't A Slave. He Was Free! This Brother Was A Conquistador Who Came With Ponce De Leon. He Was Looking For The Fountain Of Youth Just Like The White People Were.

In America One Drop Of Black Ancestry Makes You Black.

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

My Earliest Childhood Memory Is Of My Father Going Crazy When The Giants Won The World Series In 1954. He Started Whoopin' And Hollerin' And Jumpin' Up And Down All Around The Living Room. I Started Crying Because He Scared Me To Death.

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.

We Have To Stop Making Excuses. One Of The Things That I'm Careful To Show Is The Horrendous Effects Of Institutional And Structural Racism, But In The End, You Can't Wait For White Man Or A Black Man To Come Riding In On A White Horse To Save You. We Have To Save Ourselves, And That's The Lesson Of "the African Americans."

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'm A Tech Geek. Whenever I Read About Something New, I Think To Myself, How Can I Take This And Make It Black?

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

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.

Everything My Mother And Father Did Was Designed To Put Me Where I Am.

Mother And Father

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.

It's Important To Debunk The Myths Of Africa Being This Benighted Continent Civilized Only When White People Arrived. In Fact, Africans Had Been Creators Of Culture For Thousands Of Years Before. These Were Very Intelligent, Subtle And Sophisticated People, With Organized Societies And Great Art.

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.

That's What I Mean By Being Bilingual: Comfortable In Your Skin, Comfortable With All Parts Of Who You Are.

You Have To Have A Canon So The Next Generation Can Come Along And Explode It.

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

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

I Have No Plans To Slow Down.

Precisely That, Covering 500 Years Of African-american History In Six Hours. I've Been Working On This For Seven Years. The Biggest Challenge Was Deciding Which Stories To Tell.

African American

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.

I Give A Speech To The Black Freshmen At Harvard Each Year, And I Say, "you Can Like Mozart And Ice Hockey..." - And Then I Used To Say "golf," But Tiger Took Over Golf! - "and Picasso And Still Be As Black As The Ace Of Spades."

There Haven't Been Fundamental Structural Changes In America. There's Been A Very Important Symbolic Change And That Is The Election Of Barack Obama. But The Only Black People Who Truly Live In A Post-racial World In America All Live In A Very Nice House On 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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.

The Biggest Surprise For Me, Without A Doubt, Was That The First Black People Who Came To The United States Weren't The 20 Who Arrived In Jamestown In 1619. All Of Us Had Been Taught That. The First African Came To Florida In 1513. And The Huge Shock Is We Know His Name, Juan Garrido, And That He Wasn't A Slave. He Was Free!

Thousand Years Ago, We All Descended From Africans Who Left The Continent. Those Ancestors, We Will Never Know Their Name. We Can Go Back 200 Or 300 Years And Actually Populate Your Family Tree With Real People Who Had Names And Documents. They Had Customs, Characteristics That, Unbeknownst To You, You Have Inherited. Almost Through Osmosis It Has Been Passed Down To You.

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.

It's Fascinating How Life Works.

My Goal Is To Get Everybody In America To Do Their Family Tree.

Learning To Sing One's Own Songs, To Trust The Particular Cadences Of Own's Voices, Is Also The Goal Of Any Writer.

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

My Producers And I Worked With These Consultants And Came Up With Seventy [stories] Which We Think Are Exemplary Of The Larger Arc Of African-american History Between 1513 And 2013. We Covered Half A Millennium, And It's Amazing.

African American

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

People Who Own Property Feel A Sense Of Ownership In Their Future And Their Society. They Study, Save, Work, Strive And Vote. And People Trapped In A Culture Of Tenancy Do Not.

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.

I Want To Be Black, To Know Black, To Luxuriate In Whatever I Might Be Calling Blackness At Any Particular Time, But To Do So In Order To Come Out On The Other Side, To Experience A Humanity That Is Neither Colorless Nor Reducible To Color.

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.

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.

The Act Of Writing For The Slave Constituted The Act Of Creating A Public, Historical Self, Not Only The Self Of The Individual Author But Also The Self, As It Were, Of The Race.

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.

I Think That We Need More Economic-based Solutions To The Problems Afflicting The Black Community, And I Think That That's A Way To Redefine Affirmative Action. I Grew Up With Poor White People In West Virginia, And I Know There's A Culture Of Poverty. I Know That I've Seen White People Perform Exactly The Same Pathological Forms Of Behavior As Black People Do When They're Systematically Deprived, Whether It's Getting Pregnant, Doing Drugs, Dropping Out Of School, Whatever We're Talking About. I Think That We Should Have Affirmative Action For Poor White People Too.

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Willard Van Orman Quine

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