Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

As a child and a teenager, my attitudes and actions assumed the superiority of my race in almost every way without knowing or wanting to know anybody who was black, except Lucy. Lucy came to our house on Saturdays to help my mother clean. I liked Lucy, but the whole structure of the relationship was demeaning.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America, and he will say that government welfare programs were designed to attract large numbers of blacks to the cities, where they would foment a vicious race war... .

I should think the souls of the Africans would sit heavily on the swords of the Americans.

White men are taking advantage of black men all over the world because black men are disunited.

It is an axiom that any criticism of high out-of-wedlock birth rates is an attack on blacks.

I myself am a descendant of the European tribes, now called nations, that have established political, military, and economic dominance over the world. I confess to my sin of privilege and my reluctance to forego the perks my race and class afford me.

Sexist and racist economic policies in the United States such as a lack of educational opportunity for poor families and a lack of sustainable income from many jobs contribute to women’s and girls’ entry into prostitution. The economic and legal vulnerability of undocumented immigrant women in the United States is exploited in prostitution/pornography

Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.

I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them.

It's always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic side - we are doing very well - and the other things are not solving - they're compounding.

I grew up in an area that was the typical city that was a racially divided and economically segregated place. And it had a big influence on me.

Broken Britain isn't just about our indebted economy, it's also about our broken society and broken politics too.

When black men become millionaires and can buy expensive homes for their families, it infuriates people who cherish the social construct where white people are at the top and people of other ethnic backgrounds are below.

The best time to have a baby is when you're a black teenager.

We adults, our policies, our ways of governance, are responsible for poverty, not the children.

Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

Even in the era of the first black president, racism is still the most intractable issue in USA. Regarding poverty, half of all Americans are either in or near poverty. Poverty is certainly worse for African-Americans now than it was during King's lifetime.

No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

Neglect of an effective birth control policy is a never-failing source of poverty which, in turn, is the parent of revolution and crime.

Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.