Henry Louis Gates
Henry Louis Gates
Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr.is an American literary critic, teacher, historian, filmmaker and public intellectual who currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He has discovered what are considered the first books by African-American writers, both of them women, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth16 September 1950
CountryUnited States of 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.
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.
That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.
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.
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.
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.
The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
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.
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.
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
I have no plans to slow down.