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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.

-Henry Louis Gates

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You Had One Guy

Henry Louis Gates

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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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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I Have No Plans To Slow Down.

Arnold Rampersad's Stunningly Revealing Biography Has, At Long Last, Unveiled-in Magisterial Prose-the Very Complex And Vulnerable Man Behind Ralph Ellison's Own Masks And Myths. One Of The Nation's Most Brilliant Writers Emerges As All The More Fascinating Precisely Because He Was So Very Human. Painstakingly Researched And Compellingly Written, Ralph Ellison Is A Masterwork Of The Genre Of Literary Biography.

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.

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

There Are Just So Many Stories That Are Buried On Family Trees.

Patriotism Is Best Exemplified Through Auto-critique.

The Thing About Living In A Village At The Foot Of A Mountain Is That The World For You Becomes, Without Thinking About It, Self-contained. People Are Of Two Kinds, Really: From The Valley, And From Elsewhere.

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.

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.

Lincoln Had A Tremendous Capacity For Personal Growth - More Than Any Other American President.

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

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.

We Must Begin To Understand The Nature Of Intertextuality . . . The Manner By Which Texts Poems And Novels Respond To Other Texts. After All, All Cats May Be Black At Night, But Not To Other Cats.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So Many People Of Color Who Made Major Contributions To American History Have Been Trapped In The Purgatory Of History.

American History

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Censorship Is To Art As Lynching Is To Justice.

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.'

I Don't Think The Riots Derailed The Civil Rights Movement.

An Impressively Researched And Documented Collection Of The Finest Thought Produced By Writers Throughout The African Diaspora. A Magnificent Achievement.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 To Promulgate A Middle-class Ethic Of Success Among The Poor, While Expanding Opportunities For Economic Betterment.

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.

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 Truth Is I Would Do My Job For Free! I Love It Every Day. If You Can Possibly Choose A Vocation That's An Avocation, A Job That's Really A Hobby, Then You'll Be Way Ahead Of The Game. 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.

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

Mother And Father

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.

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

The Genius Is Making A Way Out Of No Way.

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.

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

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.

Suffering Does Not Necessarily Ennoble You.

Brazil Is The Second Blackest Nation In The World.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It's Fascinating How Life Works.

The Second Thing That Happened Is, Dna Analysis Is Much More Sophisticated. All You Have To Do Now Is Spit In A Test Tube And You Find Out All Kind Of Things In Six Weeks - Where They Are From In Africa Or Europe. You Can Prove Or Disprove The Fundamental African-american Myth That You Descended From A Cherokee Great, Great Grandmother.

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.

Diversity Doesn't Mean Black And White Only.

Black And White

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

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.

One Principle I've Been Fighting For That Doesn't Endear Me To A Lot Of People Is That Black People Can Be Just As Complicated And Screwed Up As White People. Our Motives Can Be Just As Base And Violent. Suffering Does Not Necessarily Ennoble You.

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.

In The Old Days, You Lived In One Neighborhood, You Knew All Your Neighbors And Your Daughter Married The Guy Next Door. That Was Social And Economic Progress. That Model Is Gone Now. We Also Had A World Order That Was Fraught But Fairly Stable.

The Story Of The African-american People Is The Story Of The Settlement And Growth Of America Itself, A Universal Tale That All People Should Experience.

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

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

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.

I Think Literacy Is Everything.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's No Surprise That White People Say Things When They Are Together About Black People.

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.

In America One Drop Of Black Ancestry Makes You Black.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Without Doubt, President [barack] Obama Is A Great Historical Figure.

In Ethiopia, The Black People Became Christians 1700 Years Ago, Hundreds Of Years Before Northern Europe Turned To Christianity... And Here, Most Of The Saints Are Black.

Where Do Real Conversations About Citizenship Occur? In Our Schools. Think About The Things You Learned In First Grade. "my Country 'tis Of Thee," "i Pledge Allegiance To The Flag," "america The Beautiful."

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

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

African American

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 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!

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."

A More Humane Form Of Capitalism Is About The Best I Think We Can Get. Which Might Sound Very Reformist Or Conservative, But That's Basically Where I Am.

The First Slave To Read And Write Was The First To Run Away.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

I Want To Be Remembered As Someone Who Tried To Bring The Story Of Our Ancestors To The Broadest Possible Audience. I Want To Be Remembered As A Man Who Loved His Race.

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.

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.'

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.

Kansas City Lightning Succeeds As Few Biographies Of Jazz Musicians Have. . . This Book Is A Magnificent Achievement; I Could Hardly Put It Down.

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."

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.

Instill Respect For Teachers.

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

Very Few, If Any, First-generation Black Or White Or Asian Kids Will Pursue A Ph.d. They'll Pursue The Professions For Economic Security. Many Will Go To Law School And/or Business School.

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

Looking Forward

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

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.

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.

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.

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

What People Forget Is That The Most Radical Thing About Obama Is That He Was The First Black Man In History To Imagine That He Could Become President, Who Was Able To Make Other Americans Believe It As Well. Other Than That, He Is A Centrist, Just Like I Try To Be. He's Been Bridging Divisions His Whole Life.

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

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.

We Can't All Work In The Inner City. And, I Don't Even Think That It Is Incumbent Upon An African-american Intellectual To Be Concerned In Their Work With Problems Of Race And Class. It's Just One Of The Things, That We Here At The Dubois Institute, Are Concerned About.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

English Literature

It's Not White Versus Black Any More, It's Haves Versus Have-nots. Unless The Black Middle-classes Unite To Promote The Interests Of The Black Underclass, Tension Between Them Is Inevitable. What We, The Black Middle Class Have To Do, Is Think Of A Strategy To Avert That.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Really, The Values Under Which My Generation Was Raised In The '50s Were Immigrant Values Even Though We Weren't Immigrants. The Greatest Thing You Could Be Was A College-educated Negro.

Mama And I Would Go To A Funeral And She'd Stand Up To Read The Dead Person's Eulogy. She Made The Ignorant And Ugly Sound Like Scholars And Movie Stars, Turned The Mean And Evil Into Saints And Angels. She Knew What People Had Meant To Be In Their Hearts, Not What The World Had Forced Them To Become. She Knew The Ways In Which Working Too Hard For Paltry Wages Could Turn You Mean And Cold, Could Kill The Thing That Made You Laugh.

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

For Black America Needs A Politics Whose First Mission Isn't The Reinforcement Of The Idea Of Black America; And A Discourse Of Race That Isn't Centrally Concerned With Preserving The Idea Of Race And Racial Unanimity. We Need Something We Don't Yet Have: A Way Of Speaking About Black Poverty That Doesn't Falsify The Reality Of Black Advancement; A Way Of Speaking About Black Advancement That Doesn't Distort The Enduring Realities Of Black Poverty.

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.

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

The Thing About Black History Is That The Truth Is So Much More Complex Than Anything You Could Make Up.

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?

One Must Learn How To Be Black In America.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

My Father, If Anything, First And Last, Was A Man Of Words. He Loved Stories; He Didn't Live For Stories, Exactly, But I Think He Lived Through Stories. I Think, Like Many Writers, He Loved Stories About Things He Had Experienced As Much As, If Not More Than, He Loved The Experiences Themselves.

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

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.

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.

Very Few Black People Ever Embraced Back To Africa Movements, And Very Few Actually, A Tiny Number Actually Went Back To Africa. They Said, "we Are Going To Make America Live Up To The Ideals Of The Declaration Of Independence And The Constitution Of The United States." They Produced One Of The World's Great Cultures; They Produced Individuals Who Were Just As Brilliant And Made Contributions To The World Civilization. In Fact, They Produced A World-class Civilization, The African American Civilization, In Music, In Dance, In Oratory, In Religion, In Writing.

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.

The More You Learn About Yourself And Your Family Tree, Your Self-esteem Goes Up. They Will Learn Archival Skills, Historical Analysis And Science Skills. You Learn All This In The Most Seductive Way, And That Is Through Learning About Yourself. Who Doesn't Like Talking About Themselves? It Doesn't Seem Like Science Or History, It's Just Fun.

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

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.

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

The Truth Is I Would Do My Job For Free! I Love It Every Day. If You Can Possibly Choose A Vocation That's An Avocation, A Job That's Really A Hobby, Then You'll Be Way Ahead Of The Game.

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

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.

I Didn't Feel Particularly Close To My Father.

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