"So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.“

-Henry Louis Gates

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Henry Louis Gates quote on Experience: "So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Le..." - Aesthetic Wallpaper & Wisdom

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"Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?"

-Henry Louis Gates

"We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community."

-Henry Louis Gates

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"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

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"The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?"

-Henry Louis Gates

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"But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example."

-Henry Louis Gates

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"The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."

-Henry Louis Gates

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"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."

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"Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print experience is what you get when you don't."

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"Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience."

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"Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession."

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