You can read the full quote from the book Damballah (1981), and others by John Edgar Wideman, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read the quote in its full context here.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Suggested Reading
Video will return here when scrolled back into view
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.