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
The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.
I didn't feel particularly close to my father.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
One must learn how to be black in America.
Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.
Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
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.
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.