", The lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. 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. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. 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. Time will tell. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). 7. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. 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. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. And I gave it to her for birthday. In 2021, the National World War Two Museum recognized Gates with its American Spirit Award. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. Or they stayed home, and they drew. 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. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. 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' 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 has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. 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. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. And I think that that's sad. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. Thank you. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. What percent would be from Europe? GATES: Well, the average African-American GATES: The average African-American is 24 percent European. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? Crockett Jr., Stephen A. GATES: For which she paid cash. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. 35 (1): 212227. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. GATES: OK. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. 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. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker, who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Over . - like the Aunt Jemima figure. 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). The world just isn't like that. 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. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. I was more of a bookworm. And she throws herself on the casket. 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. And she was a beautiful woman. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. 3. 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 if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies fieldespecially those campaigning for government reparations for slaveryby insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold Blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. And my brother went off to dental school. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. 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. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. The series is the latest iteration of Gatess innovative, fascinating foray into the nexus of genealogy and genetic ancestry testing that began four years ago with African American Lives (and continued with African American Lives 2 and Oprahs Roots). 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. I can do it. GROSS: Whoa. 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 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. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. 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. This is called an admixture test. 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. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. I go, goodbye. While assignment to the haplogroup L3x, for example, indicates an ancestor in what is now Ethiopia at least 50,000 years ago, this interesting detail does not fill in the contours of the family tree. GROSS: Yeah. Yeah. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? He was a free negro, as we would have said then. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, considered Gates's emphasis on there being "little discussion" of African involvement in the slave trade to be unfounded, stating that "today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information". Race is a social construction. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. 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? 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 when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. James . Other works by Gates included Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (1994), Colored People: A Memoir (1994), The Future of the Race (1996; with Cornel West), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: Americas First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (2003), America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (2004), In Search of Our Roots (2009), and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019). You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, "Signifyin'" refers to the significance of words that is based on context, and is accessible only to those who share the cultural values of a given speech community. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). 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. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. [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. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.