Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere.

We have a choice: we can allow the growing disparity between rich and poor to continue unimpeded, or we can take action to budget responsibly and strengthen and expand the middle class. If we want this economy - and this country - to meet its full potential, the choice is simple.

It's not in our nature. Americans have never been a people that drive through a nice neighborhood and say, 'Oh, I hate the people who live in these nice houses.'

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

We have an economy that's really geared toward rewarding the investor class. What are we doing to make sure that people who want to have a middle-class life are able to keep up?

I don't really care much about what the top one per cent earn. The gap we ought to care about in wealth is between the middle and the bottom.

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

I think America has dealt with - I mean, this is simplistic, and of course I don't live in America - but the impression I get is that there is not a kind of obligation to dislike those who are better off or be frightened of those who are worse off.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing.

It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.

There's great disparity between who goes to college and who goes to jail. Who lives long and who dies prematurely, is the defining issue of our time. And I submit to you, there's a significant race dimension, it is basically class-driven.