So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. 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). After that, everything stopped. In 2020, Gates was honored with the Louis Stokes Community VisionaryAward. 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. And she throws herself on the casket. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? Omissions? As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. Gat. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. And my brother went off to dental school. 1. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. And then it was a property requirement. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? 5. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, considered Gates's emphasis on there being "little discussion" of African involvement in the slave trade to be unfounded, stating that "today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information". One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. But I also watched TV. I was more of a bookworm. Copyright 2019 NPR. Updates? It was just misdiagnosed. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. Gates also notes that it is equally difficult to decide who should get such reparations and who should pay them, as slavery was legal under the laws of the colonies and the United States. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. [7] In his major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, Gates expressed what might constitute an African-American cultural aesthetic. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. It was better to be free than be a slave, but you were free but not free. Jakes and Chris Tucker. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. It doesn't exist. Barack Obama. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. It's a lot of data to process. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. But on the other hand, Terry, there were a lot of people who never forgave the country for electing a black man to the White House. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. GATES: I said, thank God. 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 then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. My great-great-grandfather's now been found. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. Gates' Daughter Speaks Out CBS 2.04M subscribers Subscribe 53K views 13 years ago Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama. 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. In front of all these people and all these viewers. Episode 1409A -- Pictured in this screengrab: Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. During an interview on February 22, 2021 -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950, Keyser, West Virginia, U.S.), American literary critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of African and African American literature. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. We'll hear more after a short break. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. [18] To build Harvard's visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a collection assembled by Dominique de Mnil in Houston. This trip came 25 years after Gates worked at a hospital in Kilimatinde, near Dodoma, Tanzania, when he was a 19-year-old pre-medical student at Yale University. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. And, although full genome sequencing is becoming more common and affordable, haplotype grouping relies upon the more narrow analysis of mtDNA and Y-DNA. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. (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.) I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. The current PBS documentary miniseries Faces of America traces the family histories of 12 prominent people who, over the course of several hours and with the aid of conventional and genetic genealogy, come to fasten their varied tribulations and successes to the arc of ancestry. And I loved the news. And GATES: Yeah. As of February 2022, Gates, 71, serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. Corrections? 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. TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Because you've talked to everybody about their genealogy, I want to talk with you about yours and what you've learned about yourself and the larger meaning of what you've learned about yourself. That's a long time when you're young. GATES: And think about it. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. He looked white. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. It was a horrible, horrible thing. He has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. 6. Professor Gates is the host of the documentary " Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. - like the Bible says? Gates developed the notion of signifyin in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988). [20], In September 1995, Gates narrated a five-part abridgement (by Margaret Busby) of his memoir Colored People on BBC Radio 4.[21]. Alexanders relation to Colbert or Longorias to Ma underscores a central theme of the series: Underlying the many faces of America is a fundamental genetic unity. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. He was 97, as you said. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." 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. 10. GATES: Yeah, yeah. You might have breast cancer. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Then he'd come back. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. By Alondra Nelson. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. However, in the 60s amid the Civil Rights Movement, Vivian had been the target of attention from white supremacists since they believed she looked Black. GATES: But then they did another special test. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. Gates was the host and co-producer of African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008) in which the lineage of more than a dozen notable African Americans was traced using genealogical and historical resources, as well as genealogical DNA testing. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. Would you do it? Many of us were troubled. In the early 1980s Gates rediscovered the earliest novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilsons Our Nig (1859), by proving that the work was in fact written by an African American woman and not, as had been widely assumed, by a white man from the North. Whereas prior shows relied heavily on analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome (Y-DNA), yielding results that included at most about 2 percent of ones complete genetic inheritance, in Faces techniques are used that probe deeper into more of the genome. So you GATES: Because of this white man. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). And I was exhilarated. They lived together. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. [23] He had known of some European ancestry, but was surprised to learn the high proportion; he also learned that he was descended from John Redman, a mulatto veteran in New England of the American Revolutionary War. 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. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? Kids don't even know what they are anymore, but everybody here does. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. As Elizabeth Alexander comments in Faces about her own family history, We dont even know the half of it. That profound uncertainty makes it all the more troubling that Gladwell translates the peculiar institution into a personal burden. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies fieldespecially those campaigning for government reparations for slaveryby insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold Blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? On hand again is admixture analysistesting that probes a persons full nuclear DNA for genetic indicators said to be suggestive of ancestry; percentages of African, American Indian, European, or Asian descent are inferred from those informative markers. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. What percent would be Native American? The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. So that was a steal. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. But it's just not those two genetic lines. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). He learned the truth when he appeared on an episode of the new PBS series Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, with his fair skin and blue eyes, had long . So I'm out there. After that I would say I was a teacher. Was this an equal sexual relationship? Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. Advertisement In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. What percent would be from Europe? Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950, Keyser, West Virginia, U.S.), American literary critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of African and African American literature. If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. It feels heartbreaking, Rosanne Cash admitted through tears after finding out that an ancestor of her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash the first wife of singer-songwriter Johnny Cash, who both received threats from the KKK was enslaved. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. They flew him in from San Francisco. Other works by Gates included Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (1994), Colored People: A Memoir (1994), The Future of the Race (1996; with Cornel West), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: Americas First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (2003), America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (2004), In Search of Our Roots (2009), and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019). Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. At Yale University in 1973, he was one of 12 students selected as a Scholar of the House, a program that allows seniors to write a book or compose a symphony or follow a similar passion instead of taking classes. And we'd have the chess board set up. GROSS: OK. And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. 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. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. 2. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? Hollywood Life And before I started school - I started school when I was, well, 5, turning 6 - I would get dressed up, and I would go to church with my mom. GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. 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. And I hope they are. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. He earned his B.A. African-American - I love to joke about this. More than anyone else, the historian is responsible for "entertaining the idea remotely" that Gates could become a writer. "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!" . Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . Does race exist? They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. We're all admixed. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. 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. And he mustered in in Winchester, Va., on Christmas Day, 1778, and was mustered down the Continental Army in April of 1784. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. The program documents a 3,000-mile journey Gates took through Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania, with his then-wife, Sharon Adams, and daughters, Liza and Meggie Gates. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. His name was John Redman. And if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. And they stayed home, and they read. 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? GATES: That was one of the happiest days of my life when my brother went to dental school. It's a gift - and for my mom. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. In 2021, Gates was honored by PEN America with its Audible Literary Service Award. You have to get permission. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. And what's the real showstopper for me is the fact that my three sets of my fourth great grandparents lived 18 miles from where I was born.
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