The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. GROSS: Yeah. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. 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. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. And we'd have the chess board set up. 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. And you - the last scene is the funeral. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. And she throws herself on the casket. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. 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. GATES: Yeah. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. So we knew he was Irish. 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. Will we reach consilience"William Whewells term for the combining of information from different domains toward the unity of knowledgebetween conventional and genetic genealogy (and, moreover, among the types of genetic analysis at play)? At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. Henry Louis Gates's Extended Family. What percent would be Native American? And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). Obama then held a much-publicized meeting with Gates and James Crowley, the officer who had arrested Gates, which became informally known as the beer summit because Obama invited the two for beers in the White House Rose Garden. This program examined the genealogy of 12 North Americans of diverse ancestry: Elizabeth Alexander, Mario Batali, Stephen Colbert, Louise Erdrich, Malcolm Gladwell, Eva Longoria, Yo-Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Queen Noor of Jordan, Mehmet Oz, Meryl Streep, and Kristi Yamaguchi. [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. And they stayed home, and they read. But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." GATES: Yeah, yeah. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. After receiving a doctoral degree in English language and literature in 1979, Gates taught literature and African American studies at Yale University, Cornell University, Duke University, and Harvard University, where he was appointed W.E.B. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? 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. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. His name was John Redman. 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. GROSS: Totally stunned. His writing includes pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes Black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. So (laughter) given the example that President Obama set in calming down that kind of argument in America over you and this officer, what do you hear now coming from our president? 1. GROSS: So given this kind of really rich mix that you've just described and all the surprises that you've just described, what does race mean to you? GATES: Don't you? So that was a steal. In Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called the Cambridge Police Department "stupid" for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. In 1984, Gates was recruited by Cornell University with an offer of tenure; Gates asked Yale whether the university would match Cornell's offer, but they declined. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. In front of all these people and all these viewers. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. GROSS: Yeah. 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. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. GROSS: Huge story. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden eventually extended an invitation to Gates and the Cambridge officer who was involved to share a beer with them at the White House, which they accepted. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. But I saw that photograph and read her obituary on the day that we buried my father's father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. And, although full genome sequencing is becoming more common and affordable, haplotype grouping relies upon the more narrow analysis of mtDNA and Y-DNA. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. 8. The show makes use of gene-sequencing techniques that have become widely available since African American Lives first aired, like whole-genome sequencing, which entails the mapping of all six billion base pairs in a persons DNA. And they would be published in the newspaper. He has insisted that Black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the Black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism". ". Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. I'm here to ask, on behalf of our production staff, if you will be a guest in next season GATES: Of "Finding Your Roots." [1] He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon. GATES: I said, thank God. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. 1. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. And my brother went off to dental school. Later, he acquired and authenticated the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a novel from the same period that scholars believe may have been written as early as 1853. And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. 22,158 talking about this. Graduated from Piedmont High School in 1968, Gates attended Potomac State College of West Virginia University before transferring to Yale University, from which, in 1973, he earned a bachelor of arts degree in history, summa cum laude, and he gained membership in Phi Beta Kappa. I think you know where I'm heading here. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. This is FRESH AIR. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. 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. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. Gat. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. 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. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. I love you. He wrote his first column (about Little League games) at age 12 for the Piedmont Herald in West Virginia and continued to write for his high school and college newspapers. GATES: Otherwise they wouldn't be in a database. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. We started to roll. Fifty or a hundred years from now, he explains, my hope for the present generation is that a future Du Bois will look back on our time and say that, in this era of fracture, we drew a line. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. Time will tell. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. 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. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. We might think of Faces of America, then, as an allegory of the simultaneous diversity of our experiences and the deep interpenetration of our histories. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. What is race? (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.) So I want to read something that you wrote about her. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. 35 (1): 212227. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). "[13] After his 2003 NEH lecture, Gates published in the same year a book entitled The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, about the early African-American poet. . 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. The minister would call on her. A white doctor misdiagnosed the injury as psychosomatic after Gates told him he wanted to become a doctor, Gates wrote in a New York Times article, "About Men: A Giant Step," in 1990. Isn't that a cool thing? 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. When my daughters were born, I had them tested for sickle cell because - black people are not the only people in the world that have sickle cell. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). 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). [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. Brooke Williams. "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!" . The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? ", 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. That's not the way it was. 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 . Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. GROSS: And then your slightly more contemporary ancestors not having any rights in the country, you know, or very few rights - not being able to vote, having to live in segregation. You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. or subscribe. It's called the Beer Summit. And I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. of Hutchins Center at @harvard. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. Each of the genetic analyses used in Facesadmixture analysis, haplotype grouping, and relative mappingincorporate underlying assumptions and algorithms that may be incompatible with the other techniques. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. In July 2009 Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct: After returning from traveling abroad, Gates had forced open the door to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which precipitated a call to police from a neighbour who believed a robbery might be underway. 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. 3. They - but you're absolutely right. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? And they have a horse-drawn carriage. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. Terry. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. Contemporary Literature. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. Season 8. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? He was 97, as you said. I love you being black. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. He was there in exile because he had been in prison and to be offering civil war for 27 months and was given a fellowship at the University of Cambridge. And we have a wall of degrees at home. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. Wants W. E. B. DuBois, Wole Soyinka and Phyllis Wheatley on the Nation's Reading Lists, As Well As Western Classics like Milton and Shakespeare". And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. In "Root Worker," a short . Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. 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. 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. GROSS: Is that too personal? "My father was so sad. He reported:[37], "I had this spiritual event where it was like the top of my head opened up. The world just isn't like that. Theyve Had an Inappropriate Relationship For Months, How Black Creators Can Expand Their Network with LinkedIn. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. In the face of migration and movement and so-called nontraditional family forms, both conventional and genetic genealogy allow us to freeze for a moment the flux of the modern human experience. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. So you GATES: Because of this white man. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . Testing showed he had ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland and England. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. The "You. Race is a social construction. No one's ever asked me that, but the answer's yes because I studied with a person who has been on your show, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, when I went to the University of Cambridge. This is FRESH AIR. And then black people would tell each other - they would say, you know, be sure to watch "The Late Late Show" tonight because "Imitation Of Life," which is my favorite film - 1934, with Claudette Colbert. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. Over . GATES: And think about it. Even with the aid of cutting-edge 21st-century genealogydigitized archival records and genetic analysiswe may never know the ins and outs of how Gladwells fifth-great-grandmother came to be a slaveholder. 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. The daughter of prominent black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said her father's arrest last week at his Cambridge home has deeply saddened him. Copyright 2019 NPR. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports.
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