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Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. The "You. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). GATES: That's true. So what that means is that it's the percent of - if you had a perfect family tree, what percent would be from sub-Saharan Africa? And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. 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. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic and scholar who is known for his pioneering theories of African literatures and African American literature. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. GROSS: Yeah. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? Thank you so much for accepting this award. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. And I think that that's sad. Both would be just as important. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. So where does that come from? 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 at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. 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. 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. 35 (1): 212227. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. I'm going to be black. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. It comes from slavery. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. Then he'd come back. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. And I learned a lot about the medium. They came in slave ships. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. 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. doi:10.2307/1208745. Over . Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? Crockett Jr., Stephen A. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. GROSS: Huge story. They were buried next to each other. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. 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. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. 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". Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. 1. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. 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)? In 2020, Gates was honored with the Louis Stokes Community VisionaryAward. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. And she throws herself on the casket. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. 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. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. I regret we are out of time. And we filmed the whole thing. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. And you - the last scene is the funeral. )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. It's called the Beer Summit. GATES: Don't you? 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. I told them that I did not want to know if I had any of the sort of - I don't know - the slam-dunk genes for Alzheimer's disease. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. Remember all the talk about post-racialism that GATES: We thought when Obama - we had turned a corner, and we could, you know, beat our - the plowshares into pruning hooks - right? Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. 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. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. Barack Obama. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. 4. ". And we'd have the chess board set up. In the second season of the program, Gates learned that he is part of a genetic subgroup that may be descended from or related to the fourth-century Irish king, Niall of the Nine Hostages. In 2006, Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary "African American Lives," the first documentary series to use genealogy and genetic science to provide an understanding of African-American history. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. 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. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. GROSS: And I read you 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. Copyright 2019 NPR. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". 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. And I hope they are. More than anyone else, the historian is responsible for "entertaining the idea remotely" that Gates could become a writer. So I'm out there. He loved the news. 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. JSTOR1208745. "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!" . [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. Sgt. 10. His work has rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.[12]. 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. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). The world just isn't like that. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. 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. They lived together. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. This is called an admixture test. 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. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. [5], At the age of 14, Gates was injured playing touch football, fracturing the ball and socket joint of his right hip, resulting in a slipped capital femoral epiphysis. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. Corrections? And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. 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. You might have breast cancer. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. What is race? GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. And they have a horse-drawn carriage. 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. Contemporary Literature. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. He argued that the material, which the government charged was profane, had important roots in African-American Vernacular English, games, and literary traditions, and should be protected. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. (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.) It was better to be free than be a slave, but you were free but not free. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. After that I would say I was a teacher. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He's also written for Time magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. I hope you never come back, you know? 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. For $50,000, they sequenced my father, me and then 12 of the guests who were in "Faces Of America" - not a full genome but a dense genotyping. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. The arrest attracted national attention after U.S. President Barack Obama controversially declared that the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" in arresting the 59-year-old Gates. GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. 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. 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. 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. After receiving two fellowships in 1970, he took a leave of absence from Yale to visit Africa, working as an anesthetist in a hospital in Tanzania and then traveling through other African nations. Except in the next scene, I showed him their headstones. It's beautiful. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. 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. Season 8. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged 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. Yeah. 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." And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. When I did Morgan Freeman's family tree, it was obvious through his DNA that he was descended from a white man who was an overseer on a plantation in Mississippi. That's a long time when you're young. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Of course not. So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. 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. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. 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. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. The furor over the recent arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. erupted again Thursday following sharp criticism of the Cambridge Police Department by President Obama. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called the book "an attempt to size Lincoln up through the eyes of Black Americans who visited the 'people's house' that their people had built and in whose names they were determined to win the fight for freedom and citizenship." So we knew he was Irish. 2. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. It was a horrible, horrible thing. 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. But it's just not those two genetic lines. 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. GATES: I said, thank God. In 2021, Gates was honored by PEN America with its Audible Literary Service Award. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. Alondra Nelson is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. He argues, "It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,"[13] adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. 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: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. And that night - and then daddy showed my brother and me, Dr. Paul Gates now, chief of dentistry at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital GATES: Well, it's the spirit of my mother. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. It doesn't exist. Signifyin is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. 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. The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. A new season of Finding Your Roots premieres January 4, 2022! 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. 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). 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. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. We defended the right of every American to vote. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. 5. 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. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. or subscribe. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? - like the Aunt Jemima figure. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. 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. From the 1980s Gates edited a number of critical anthologies of African American literature, including Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), Bearing Witness: Selections from African American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (1991), and (with Nellie Y. McKay) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997). 6.4K views 13 years ago Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates, takes a few minutes to call CNN from Martha's Vineyard and talk to Don Lemon about the.