#erica

It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#american revolution #ancestors #army #continental #fought

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#everybody #family #get #goal #their

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#against #america #anti-semitic #based #best

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#american history #been #color #contributions #history

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#admire #again #america #avenue #barack

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#african-american community #attitude #black #brown #city

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#been #black #buried #contributions #go

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? ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#american #as far as #back #black #born

I never get tired of exploring Americana or country music, and I always have a little bit of a crooner in me that never seems to go away. ↗

— K. D. Lang

#americana #away #bit #country #country music

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#about #adventure #always #america #american