#ted

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#been #black #complicated #does #ennoble

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#beautiful #blend #bottom #brazil #brown

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

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#always #brutality #european #haunted #heard

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#fascinated #i #kid #little #little kid

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#believe #built #came #cities #denied

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#africa #alex #back #case #envy

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#back #black #contribution #could #created

Government funding that's coming from the United States is making a huge difference on the ground in the developing world. It's really palpable - it's making a huge difference saving lives. ↗

— Melinda Gates

#developing #developing world #difference #funding #government

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio. ↗

— Melinda Gates

#child #children #differently #get #granted