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Race is a social construction. We started to roll. What percent would be from Europe? 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. After that, everything stopped. But they came from someplace else. Barack Obama. 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". 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. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. 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. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. At the time, only Vivians European background had been known, and this discovery in her ancestryresurfaced thanks to a profile on Johnnys first wife in The Washington Poston May 16. Ozzy & Sharon Osbournes Grandkids: Meet Their Grandchildren, Click to Subscribe to Get Our Free HollywoodLife Daily Newsletter, Rosanne Cash: 5 Things To Know About Johnnys Daughter Whos Speaking Out About His June Carter Affair, 'Finding Your Roots' Preview: Jeff Goldblum Reveals How His Mom Helped Him Fight A Bully, Ozzy & Sharon Osbournes Grandkids: Meet Their Grandchildren, Beautiful Nature-Inspired Baby Names Used By Celebrity Parents, Did Vanderpump Rules Tom Cheated on Ariana With Raquel? So reading this - that she's a mulatto; she'd been a slave - the first question that comes to my mind - and I don't know if it was the first question that came to yours - was, was she raped by the man who owned her? And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." 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. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. GATES: OK. Gates is the host of the TV genealogy series "Finding Your Roots." But I think that Donald Trump's rhetoric and some of his actions - for instance, after Charlottesville - encourage unfavorable race relations in the United States. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. 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 . Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. 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. Gatess own genealogical narrative, unfurled against the backdrop of images of his family gathering in the kitchen or tender interactions with his nonagenarian father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., is also quite moving. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). 1. In 2021, Gates received the MIPAD 100 Network's Most Influential People of African Descent Lifetime Achievement Award. It's - remember, it's - my father dragged my brother and me upstairs in his parents' home and made us wait why he'd look through half a dozen of his father's scrapbooks, about which we knew nothing - complete mystery, a secret to us - looking for that obituary. The show's third season was postponed after it was discovered that actor Ben Affleck had persuaded Gates to omit information about his slave-owning ancestors. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. 6. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. Many of us were troubled. This is FRESH AIR. 22,158 talking about this. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). GROSS: Whoa. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. In 2021, the National World War Two Museum recognized Gates with its American Spirit Award. In addition to producing and hosting previous series on the history and genealogy of prominent American figures, since 2012, Gates has been host of the television series Finding Your Roots on PBS. 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. Author Herb Boyd, who teaches African and African-American history at the College of New Rochelle and City College, CUNY, argued that despite the complicity of African monarchs in the Atlantic slave trade, the United States "was the greatest beneficiary, and thus should be the main compensator". And I was in the hospital for six weeks. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. And I'm wondering if being laid up from an injury for a while affected your desire to - and your time to immerse yourself in books. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. In "Root Worker," a short . 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. 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. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. 4. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. 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. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. 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. That's a long time when you're young. Since 2012, he has hosted a PBS television series, entitled Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr..[24] The second season of the series, featuring 30 prominent guests across 10 episodes, with Gates as the narrator, interviewer, and genealogical investigator, aired on PBS in fall 2014. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. GATES: Well, the average African-American GATES: The average African-American is 24 percent European. Gates wrote a book about Jay Rockefeller's campaign to be governor of West Virginia. What do you think of that? GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. And GATES: Yeah. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. The world just isn't like that. So you GATES: Because of this white man. Isn't that a cool thing? So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. GATES: Yeah. He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. He introduced the notion of signifyin to represent African and African American literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. The technical aspects of genetic ancestry tracing are explained, but without sufficient social context, much the way a manual can tell you how to operate a car without explaining automobiles role in modern industry, the development of suburbia, or the emergence of youth culture. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. It was astonishing. It was better to be free than be a slave, but you were free but not free. 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. 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. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. GROSS: And it made me think about - because I was just reading this - it made me think about how a president can set the tone for the country on so many things, including, you know, racial issues, immigration. 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. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. 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. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. 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. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. In Root Worker, a short story by Edward P. Jones, a chronically ill African-American woman who migrated to Washington, D.C., from North Carolina returns to the South with her husband and daughter, a physician, in search of the cure that has eluded her for decades in the North. So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". The series combines the work of expert researchers in genealogy, history, and historical research in genetics to tell guests about the lives and histories of their ancestors. They had kids, and they're buried next to each other. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. Gates's web series, "Black History in Two Minutes (Or So)", which he executive produces with Robert F. Smith and Dyllan McGee, earned five Webby Awards, including for Best Podcast: Documentary and Best Video Series: Education & Discovery (2020), Best Podcast: Documentary and Best Social Video: Discovery & Education (2021) and Best Social Video: Discovery & Education (2022). These American faces, we learn, are the descendants of colonialists, aboriginals, overseers, bondspeople, interned citizens, and religious pilgrims. American playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. We defended the right of every American to vote. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. The minister would call on her. And we'd have the chess board set up. And that is a long time. 2. Amid discussion of Malcolm Gladwells roots, Gates discloses that the best-selling authors Jamaican maternal ancestor, a free woman of color, owned slaves of African descent. 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. But mutations exist. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. 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. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. 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. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. 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. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. I only did black people. 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. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. In addition to Rosanne, Vivian and Johnny welcomed three other daughters: Cindy, Kathy and Tara. Gates argued that the pervasiveness and centrality of signifyin in African and African American literature and music means that all such expression is essentially a kind of dialogue with the literature and music of the past. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. GATES: But then they did another special test. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. 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. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. of Hutchins Center at @harvard. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. Both would be just as important. Omissions? His mother. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Louis-Gates-Jr. African American Registry - Biography of Herny Louis Gates, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. 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. NPR's Michel Martin speaks with professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. about the forthcoming episode of Finding Your Roots which features actor Joe Manganiello discovering he is of African descent. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. And I gave it to her for birthday. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. And, although full genome sequencing is becoming more common and affordable, haplotype grouping relies upon the more narrow analysis of mtDNA and Y-DNA. Elizabeth had suffered a stroke, her mind irreparably harmed. Video of the day: Drake and 21 Savage's "Spin Bout U" NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA Clyde NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA ClydeTwo quintessential Lower East Side outposts celebrate the downtown staple sneaker.HypebeastDylan Kelly Culture: Henry 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. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. GATES: That's true. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. It's beautiful. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. or subscribe. Gates graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1968 and attended a local junior college before enrolling at Yale University, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1973. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. 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. The forms of genealogical tracing that star in Faces function doubly: both splitting and lumping. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. GROSS: So when you had your DNA done, did you have a wish for a certain area of Africa or a certain group of African people who you wanted to be your ancestors? As I have written elsewhere, this new kinship category, DNA cousins, or what Gates calls autosomal cousins, suggests that flexible kinship is being made on the new (or is it the rather old) terrain of biology. Of course not. 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. 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. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? GATES: And think about it. 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). Gates collaborates with genetic scientists, including Eric Lander and David Altshuler, of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Harvard professor George Church, progenitor of the Personal Genome Project; and personal genomics companies such as 23andMe and Knome Inc. 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? GROSS: Is that too personal? And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. He was a free negro, as we would have said then. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. Thank God. 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. GATES: Otherwise they wouldn't be in a database. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. 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)? GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. I go, goodbye. When I was a boy, I was closer to my mother than my father. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. 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. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. It's a gift - and for my mom. I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. It was a horrible, horrible thing. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. My great-great-grandfather's now been found. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. 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. His mother cleaned houses.
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