But mutations exist. I love you. The first time we met was when I interviewed him for "The Reflection Effect," an essay I wrote for O, the Oprah Magazine about the power of nostalgia to drive happiness and build resilience after loss. And most DNA companies in the United States will tell you that they have never tested an African-American who is 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa. GROSS: Whoa. Henrys research also led him to discover a census from 1870, which revealed that Rosannes great-great grandfather a man named Lafayette Robsinson was mixed-race. Upon learning this, Rosanne recalled the long-running rumors of her mothers background and said, So, it was, at least, a small part true., Related: In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . So then I became close to them but in two completely different ways. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. GROSS: OK. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. I love you being black. 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. As we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King today, we're going to listen to an interview Terry recorded with historian Henry Louis Gates. And I was shocked by that. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? GATES: OK. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. A new season of Finding Your Roots premieres January 4, 2022! Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. Both would be just as important. 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. What do you think of that? It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. The fruits of the unearthed family treehistorical coherence; redemptive narratives of migration and assimilation; intergenerational social mobilityare unevenly dispersed. My mother was a seamstress, as you know. Updates? A Letter from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to his daughters Maggie and Lisa I enjoy the unselfconscious moments of a shared cultural intimacy, whatever form they take, when no one else is watching, when no white people are around. 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. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. GROSS: But it's making me think of how much death figured into your formative thoughts - the death of your grandfather, which led you to see the picture of your great-great-grandmother, everybody's deaths through your mother memorialized in those obituaries. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. 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 then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. 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. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. GATES: But then they did another special test. GATES: Yeah. )supply information about human population groups dating as far back as 150,000 years, the time horizon of admixture testing is the past 500 years. 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. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. I hope you never come back, you know? 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. 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. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. 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. 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? Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. And I learned a lot about the medium. It comes from slavery. And I gave it to her for birthday. I go, goodbye. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. The minister would call on her. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. 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. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. They had two geneticists. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. And consequently, you are now a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. 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. The world just isn't like that. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. 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 write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. [10] At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he was appointed to in 2006, and as a professor of English. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). GATES: Yeah, I loved books. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. 1. And we have a wall of degrees at home. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. Does race exist? And my brother went off to dental school. Would you do it? Then he'd come back. javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. That's a long time when you're young. [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. Thank you so much for accepting this award. And they have a horse-drawn carriage. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. GROSS: Is that too personal? He applied the notion to the interpretation of slave narratives and showed how it informs the works of Phillis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, the early African American writers of periodical fiction, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, and Soyinka. 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. Terry. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? So that was a steal. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. 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. 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." All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. And he'd make a couple - a move. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . [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. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). And I sat down. Testing showed he had ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland and England. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. 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. . But I think that one of the mottos of finding your roots is that there is no such thing as racial purity, that these people who have fantasies, these white supremacists, of this Aryan brotherhood, you know, this Aryan heritage that is pure and unsullied and untainted, that they're living in a dream world. As a result of research he conducted as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates discovered Our Nig, written by Harriet E. Wilson in 1859 and thought to be the first novel written in the United States by an African American. 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. And a doctor from the Philippines taught me to play chess at West Virginia University Medical Center in Morgantown, W.Va. And he'd come around in rounds. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. 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. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. 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? He's also written for Time magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. The book tells of Gates's childhood growing up in the 1950s in a close-knit extended family and an equally close-knit small-town community. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. He earned his B.A. The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. It's a gift - and for my mom. 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. OK. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. Accuracy and availability may vary. And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. 3. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, "Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Biography, Books, & Facts", "African American Lives The Past Is Another Country 2 4of4 YouTube", "Finding Your Roots: Decoding Our Past Through DNA", "The biggest brother: interview with Henry Louis Gates, black America's foremost intellectual", "Yale Afro-Am Chair Resigns After Remarks of Yale Pres", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. to continue at Harvard", "Henry Louis Gates is Wrong about African Involvement in the Slave Trade", Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, "Henry Louis Gates Jr. announced as editor-in-chief of the new Oxford Dictionary of African American English", "What It Means to Be Black in Latin America", "Ben Affleck's slave-owning ancestor 'censored' from genealogy show", "Ben Affleck Demanded PBS Suppress His Slave-Owning Ancestry", "Citing Ben Affleck's 'Improper Influence,' PBS Suspends 'Finding Your Roots', "PBS' 'Finding Your Roots' returning in January after Ben Affleck controversy", "West Virginia Weslesyan College biography", "Black Studies' New Star: Henry Louis Gates Jr", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. On 'The Black Church' and His Own Bargain with Jesus", "MacArthur Fellos Program: Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Literary Critic | Class of June 1981", "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement", "Mister Jefferson and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley,", "2015 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award Winners Announced", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. Receives duPont Award for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross", "Read Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Acceptance Speech for the duPont Award", "Chicago Tribune Announces 2019 Literary and Heartland Award Winners", "Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Named Don M. Randel Award Recipient | News | The Harvard Crimson", "Encarta Africana, the First Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture, Launches Today", Bibliography of Gates's publications and responses to it, African American National Biography Project, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Henry_Louis_Gates_Jr.&oldid=1142289654, African-American history of West Virginia, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows, Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Television personalities from West Virginia, African-American television personalities, Members of the American Philosophical Society, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2009, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Gates has received numerous honorary degrees, including a. When I was a boy, I was closer to my mother than my father. 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? This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. But they came from someplace else. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). 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. GROSS: And it's a way of outing people as not being who they think they are and not recognizing that we're all descended from so many different people. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. 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. "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!" . 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. Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. And, although full genome sequencing is becoming more common and affordable, haplotype grouping relies upon the more narrow analysis of mtDNA and Y-DNA. We're listening to the interview Terry recorded with Harvard historian, author and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates before an audience at WHYY in Philadelphia last May. February 12, 2010. 5. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. 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. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. 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. Of course not. And if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. 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. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Theyve Had an Inappropriate Relationship For Months, How Black Creators Can Expand Their Network with LinkedIn. He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). And she throws herself on the casket. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. I am descended from - on my father's side - from a white man who impregnated a black woman and, on my mother's side, from a white woman who was impregnated by a black man. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 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. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. I think you know where I'm heading here. Joness tale offers some insight into the appeal of genealogy, another effort at reconnection with home and kin, and ballast against the tumult of modern living. There we go. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. All rights reserved. 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? GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. 1. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. And at this point, I'd run over to my mother and say, Mama, I'll never pass for white, Mama. It's the damnedest thing I ever heard. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. Soyinka persuaded Gates to study literature instead of history; he also taught him much about the culture of the Yoruba, one of the largest Nigerian ethnic groups. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. 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: admixture, I'm 50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry, which really pisses my family off. GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. That's not the way it was. 266. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). So what I did - my father and I agreed, for science, that we'd put our genomes in the public domain so that any scholar or student can study our genome. 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. Transcript: Q&A with Henry Louis Gates Jr. January 16, 2009 Greg Hicks: Everyone welcome, this is a very special moment for us and we really want this to be just as informal as possible. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. Race is a social construction. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. In an article for Newsweek, journalist Lisa Miller reported on the reaction to Gates' article: The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. This is called an admixture test. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. "[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.