Occupation: Literary Critic Birth: September 16, 1950
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….
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post….
One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as whit….
My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip….
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories..
The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People ar….
The genius is making a way out of no way..
When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied..
The more you learn about yourself and your family tree, your self-esteem goes up. They will learn archival skills, historical analysis and science sk….
I didn't feel particularly close to my father..
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up..
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree..
We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cat….
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 ….
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 g….
I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmat….
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..
I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians..
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice..
We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just….
The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched..