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? As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. So you GATES: Because of this white man. Terry. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. 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. What is race? One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. This is FRESH AIR. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. 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). What do you think of that? [8] The first African American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Gates sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 for England, where he studied English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and earned his Ph.D. degree. GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. 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". 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. And it's just crazy. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. So that was a steal. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. 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? 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. The "You. It was a horrible, horrible thing. 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. 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. 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. In the early 1980s Gates rediscovered the earliest novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilsons Our Nig (1859), by proving that the work was in fact written by an African American woman and not, as had been widely assumed, by a white man from the North. And I loved the news. Henry Louis Gates's Extended Family. But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. What percent would be from Europe? Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. 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. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. 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. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. 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. And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). 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. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. 6. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. And she was a beautiful woman. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. 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. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. And I learned a lot about the medium. Copyright 2019 NPR. GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. So we knew he was Irish. 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. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. 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. The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . 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. And they have a horse-drawn carriage. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. I mean, they know Donald Trump. 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. 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. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. That's a long time when you're young. You have to get permission. 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. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . Fifty or a hundred years from now, he explains, my hope for the present generation is that a future Du Bois will look back on our time and say that, in this era of fracture, we drew a line. 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. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. 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. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Updates? 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. He looked white. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. So I'm out there. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. 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. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. 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). In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. 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. OK. Accuracy and availability may vary. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. 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. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans. The world just isn't like that. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? And consequently, you are now a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. 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. Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. 22,158 talking about this. My great-great-grandfather's now been found. GATES: So if you were a Martian and came down to look at my DNA results, you'd think I was a white boy, you know? That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. 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. 8. Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. 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. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. 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 she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. 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. In "Root Worker," a short . The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. GATES: Yeah. In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. 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. So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. And tears just streamed down my face. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. 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. (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. 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. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. I regret we are out of time. African-American - I love to joke about this. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. It's incredible that the mystery to my family tree - I'm looking toward Africa, and it was 18 miles away in Moorefield, W.Va., County Courthouse. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. The womans suffering is assuaged at long last when she revisits the land and people that indelibly shaped her, including a local herbal healer. It comes from slavery. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. Sgt. [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. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. 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 . Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. So everybody knew that this whole thing was building to the climax when Delilah - is her name - the character. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. They flew him in from San Francisco. Even with the aid of cutting-edge 21st-century genealogydigitized archival records and genetic analysiswe may never know the ins and outs of how Gladwells fifth-great-grandmother came to be a slaveholder. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). GATES: And I gave it to my mother once. 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. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. of Hutchins Center at @harvard. In front of all these people and all these viewers. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. [4] He also learned that he has 50% European ancestry, including Irish forebears; he was surprised his European ancestry turned out to be so substantial. 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? People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. 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. Gates is the host of the TV genealogy series "Finding Your Roots." I was more of a bookworm. 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. [1] He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon. The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. "Black people were so angry at me. 35 (1): 212227. There we go. They - but you're absolutely right. I love you. 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. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. His name was John Redman. 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? 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. And so then they came in - this is a big deal back in 2008. GROSS: There's some people who are trying to use genealogy to out people who are white supremacists and say, oh, you think you're so pure white, that that's such a big deal? GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). 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. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. He earned his B.A. 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. Barack Obama. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. Episode 1409A -- Pictured in this screengrab: Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. During an interview on February 22, 2021 -- I think you know where I'm heading here. It was astonishing. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. Isn't that a cool thing? Thank God. It's called the Beer Summit. Would you do it? He wrote his first column (about Little League games) at age 12 for the Piedmont Herald in West Virginia and continued to write for his high school and college newspapers.