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
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.
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.
My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
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.