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
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.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.
The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them.
Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.
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.
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.
Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.
Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
One must learn how to be black in America.
I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'
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.
Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.
Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president.
Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.
I'm a tech geek.
Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.
Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.
Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.
I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
It's fascinating how life works.
You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.
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.
So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.
People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances.
Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
I have no plans to slow down.
People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.
Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.
All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.
Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.
I didn't feel particularly close to my father.
