"My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'"

Family

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Thematic Reflection

This quotation examines the core nature of Family as articulated by Henry Louis Gates. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Family provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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About Henry Louis Gates

Henry Louis Gates Jr., popularly known by his childhood nickname "Skip", is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.

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More by Henry Louis Gates

"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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"You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it."

— Henry Louis Gates
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"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."

— Henry Louis Gates
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"For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony."

— Henry Louis Gates
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More about Family

"I put my friends and family first. I'm really just a normal thirteen-year-old girl who has a different hobby than most girls my age. Acting is kind of an extracurricular activity."

— Natasha Calis
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"I had a daughter who was 9 years old and I had the feeling I wasn't going to be a real parent if I didn't quit making movies for a while and spend time with her. I also felt that I'd made enough movies and said what I had to say at the time."

— Jane Campion
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"We really were a very musical family. Father managed to buy us a small pump organ, and I just loved this instrument."

— Lawrence Welk
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"I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father."

— Jules Feiffer
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