In an essay that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote in 2018 for the Encyclopdia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence, he identified voting as the most important form of resistance against hate. Still, as the sociologist Troy Duster wrote in The Chronicle Review (Deep Roots and Tangled Branches, February 3, 2006) regarding the use of this analysis in the first African American Lives, these tests rel[y] excessively on the idea of 100-percent purity, a condition that could never have existed in human populations. We learn, too, that Yo-Yo Ma is 100 percent Asian, that Streep is 100 percent European, and, in a nod to comedy and to how quickly ancestry can become racial classification, that Colbert is 100 percent white man! What is one to make of an admixture test that reveals no mixture at all? And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. And I learned a lot about the medium. GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. GROSS: Yeah. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. It was astonishing. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. Biology matters. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. The "You. And consequently, you are now a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. When asked by National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Bruce Cole to describe his work, Gates responded: "I would say I'm a literary critic. I'm going to be black. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. They flew him in from San Francisco. When I did Morgan Freeman's family tree, it was obvious through his DNA that he was descended from a white man who was an overseer on a plantation in Mississippi. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. "We deconstruct ethnic identities to show that when the lights came down, everyone was sleeping with everyone else -- that's the way human history goes!" . He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born Sept. 16, 1950, in Keyser, W.Va. His father worked at the local paper mill during the day and as a janitor at a telephone company at night. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." "My father was so sad. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. Now think about that. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Faces expands on those outings in topic and technique, branching out from the genealogies of prominent blacks to those of a multiracial, multiethnic group of notables, including the actors Eva Longoria and Meryl Streep, the writers Louise Erdrich and Malcolm Gladwell, the musician Yo-Yo Ma, the poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, the comedian Stephen Colbert, and Gates himself. Hollywood Life In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. So what that means is that it's the percent of - if you had a perfect family tree, what percent would be from sub-Saharan Africa? GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. Gates wrote a book about Jay Rockefeller's campaign to be governor of West Virginia. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. Copyright 2019 NPR. 35 (1): 212227. Time will tell. One wishes that Gates, an inimitable literary scholar well before he became a pathbreaking Renaissance man, might have alluded to another of Edward P. Joness works, The Known World, a historical novel exploring life in an antebellum community in which both blacks and whites hold black slaves, by way of even partial explanation. My dad got into a public battle with the KKK and so I knew about that, and it was scary, Rosanne said during the PBS special. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". But mutations exist. I regret we are out of time. As Faces of America concludes, the connections among several of the participants are revealed using a technique developed by Altschuler and his colleague Mark Daly that is similar to 23andMes Relative Finder. These DNA cousins share several million of the three billion base pairs, suggesting a common ancestor a few or tens of generations in the past. Elizabeth had suffered a stroke, her mind irreparably harmed. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. 1. And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. GATES: Yeah. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of lecturer in Afro-American Studies, with the understanding that he would be promoted to assistant professor upon completion of his doctoral dissertation. So I would say, you know, no, I don't think so. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and professor at Harvard University, the seriess subtitles"The Promise of America, Making America, Becoming American, and Know Thyself"suggest assimilation, a melting pot rather than a tossed salad notion of the United States. And you got this from the 1870 census - (reading) that Jane Gates, age 51, female, mulatto, laundress and nurse, owns real estate valued at $1,400; born in Maryland; cannot read or write. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. I was more of a bookworm. His mother. Other TV credits included the documentary miniseries Wonders of the African World (1999), Black in Latin America (2011), The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), and Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (2019). He is on the boards of many notable institutions, including the, In 2010, Gates became the first African American to have his, In December 2014, Gates was announced as one of 14 recipients of a 2015. Then he'd come back. This is FRESH AIR. And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. They - but you're absolutely right. I told them that I did not want to know if I had any of the sort of - I don't know - the slam-dunk genes for Alzheimer's disease. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. (Note: Clotel (1853) by William Wells Brown is recognized as the first novel published by an African-American author, but it was both written and published in London.) If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. Thank you. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He argues, "It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,"[13] adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, African American who fought in the Revolutionary War, Alfred I. duPontColumbia University Award, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, The National Institute of Social Sciences, Who's Black and Why: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race. This is FRESH AIR. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. Professor Gates is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard and has produced numerous books and documentaries about African-American history. GATES: That was one of the happiest days of my life when my brother went to dental school. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. In a February episode of the PBS show, "Finding Your Roots," host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Rosanne Cash with her DNA results and family genealogy. It's incredible. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? The series is the latest iteration of Gatess innovative, fascinating foray into the nexus of genealogy and genetic ancestry testing that began four years ago with African American Lives (and continued with African American Lives 2 and Oprahs Roots). Ostensibly one familys illness narrative, the story is also an allegory about how the experience of migrationwhether forced through slavery, pogroms, or economic vulnerability, or motivated by hope for a better futuremay generate a latent or conscious yen for community. And we have a wall of degrees at home. At one point, Johnny even told the KKK in a statement that Vivian was white. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. That's the way it is. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. Some critics suggest that adding Black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists say that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in his advocacy of integration of the canon. ", The Letters page of The New York Times of April 25, 2010, featured criticism and examination of Gates's views in response to his op-ed. Terry spoke to Henry Louis Gates in front of an audience last May when he was in Philadelphia to receive WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. In July 2022, Gates announced that he would serve as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a new glossary of language that will contain popular phrases used by historical Black figures and modern-day Black Americans. Omissions? And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. It's incredible that the mystery to my family tree - I'm looking toward Africa, and it was 18 miles away in Moorefield, W.Va., County Courthouse. All rights reserved. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. [8] The first African American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Gates sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 for England, where he studied English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and earned his Ph.D. degree. That belief is shared by Native groups that similarly objected to the Human Genome Diversity Project, as described in the work of Jenny Reardon and Kimberly TallBear. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. Rosanne Cash became tearful after learning that her mom, Vivian Liberto Cash, had a Black great-great grandmother who was subjected to a life of slavery. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. . That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. GATES: OK. Lolita Buckner Inniss, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, argued that notwithstanding African involvement as "abductors", it was Western slave-owners, as "captors", who perpetuated the practice even after the import trade was banned. For example, while haplogroupssets of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are gene-sequence variants that are inherited together and categorized by letter and number (A, L3D, R, U5b, etc. You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. Since 1995, Gates has been the jury chair for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which honors written works that contribute to society's understanding of racism and the diversity of human culture. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. That's a long time when you're young. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. Corrections? After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. She is author of the forthcoming Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race, and is at work on a book about genetic ancestry tracing and African diaspora culture. [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, a digital archive of Black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56.

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