I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.
Source: In Famous Black Quotations, ed. Janet Cheatham Bell, 1995.
-- Henry Louis Gates, Jr, (Sep 16 1950-____), US educator, critic, author; He is the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities at Harvard University; won the American Book Award for The Signifying Monkey.