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Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Good Essays

Homa Khugyani
Margaret Rustick
English 3080
7 February 2016
Henry Louis Gates Jr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Director of the Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard University, and an esteemed Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. According to his Harvard University profile he is an “Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, institution builder…and the recipient of fifty-five honorary degrees and numerous prizes.” Professor Gates was also the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 1973 he earned his Bachelors in English Language and Literature from Yale University, and in 1974-1979 he got his Master’s. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge (Department of African and African American Studies). Throughout many of his texts Gates provides examples of the ambiguity of language and identity, and the oppressive role ideology plays in the black community; allowing readers to apply the idea of deconstruction to our own daily experiences
Gates was born in 1950, and raised in Piedmont, West Virginia, by his father, Henry Louis Sr. and his mother Pauline Coleman Gates. His father worked at the local Westvaco paper mill during the day and worked nights as a janitor for a local telephone company in order to support his family. Gates ' mother, was a house cleaner and worked hard to raise her sons to live and excel in an integrated world so that they

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