Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

The root of the black man's hate is rage, not the rage agaist the white man, but the rage for him to be out of his way, especially his children's way. The root of the white man's hate is terror.

I am the descendant of slaves, of people that were born from a slave and a slave master.

My mother is white. My biological father is black. When my mother was 17, she got pregnant. They lived in Waterloo, Iowa, which at the time in 1971 was a very segregated society.

Some black women hug me and walk away. A lot of black men talk about dating white women and how they've been there, too. People open up about their racial experiences. I feel like I'm a walking therapy session. It's quite intense. But it means a lot to people.

The enslavement of Africans [in America] built the world's strongest economy.

The color of your skin is your uniform in this ultimate battle for the survival of the West.

White men ashamed of the planters who [sexually] abused helpless black women [slaves] are now trying to minimize the prevalence of this custom. Such an effort, however, means little in the face of the facts that one seventh of the Negroes in the United States had in their veins any amount of Caucasian blood in 1860 and according to the last census more than one fifth of them have this infusion

Nobody wants to get over the legacy of slavery more than Black people do.

Out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good books, for which I am deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man's soul.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

Slavery’s frontier was a white man’s sexual playground.

Great efforts are made today to deny that this or that great man had illicit relations with Negro women.

Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that.

A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.

Slavery, our country's original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers.

The Holocaust of Nazi Germany is certainly no less of a historic crime than the Holocaust that went on for centuries against African-Americans. That process of reparations, and a truth and reconciliation discussion, was extremely helpful in the country of Germany, and we need to have that here.

I am a living symbol of the white man's fear. I never realized how deeply embedded this fear is until I came to Brandfort.

I think we have come to a place in black America, sadly from my point of view, where we have once again begun to rely on our history of victimization as our primary source of power to wield within society.

When we're talking about slavery... we're really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.

America says we are a great democratic society and other people should follow our example. Well, I say we benefited from slavery, and as a nation, we never faced that because the people in power chose not to.

A lot of black women still carry a lot of pain when they see black men with women who aren't black, and that's really unfortunate that that could make us so upset. It has to do with self esteem.

I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best.

Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror - maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.