#you

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#dna #family #going #invite #mean

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#dna #family #fascinating #going #i

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#ancestry #black #drop #makes #you

It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#black #followed #get #here #institution

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

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

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#even #generation #greatest #greatest thing #immigrant

There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#boom #com #few #find #genealogy

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