Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. Since 1995, Gates has been the jury chair for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which honors written works that contribute to society's understanding of racism and the diversity of human culture. I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. They flew him in from San Francisco. [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. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. "Black people were so angry at me. ", The Letters page of The New York Times of April 25, 2010, featured criticism and examination of Gates's views in response to his op-ed. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. James . But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. 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. . GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell 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. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . 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. 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. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. I mean, they know Donald Trump. 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. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. Thank God. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. And I hope they are. 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. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged Would you do it? Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. And we have a wall of degrees at home. 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. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. 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). So we knew he was Irish. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans. It doesn't exist. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. 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 front of all these people and all these viewers. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . African-American - I love to joke about this. 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. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. I go, goodbye. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? And that is a long time. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. 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. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. But I also watched TV. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. 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." Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. Jakes and Chris Tucker. So where does that come from? Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. 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 have the Ui Neil Haplotype. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition, but has envisioned a more inclusive canon of diverse works sharing common cultural connections: "Every Black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well. Brooke Williams. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. Sgt. 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? Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, African American who fought in the Revolutionary War, Alfred I. duPontColumbia University Award, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, The National Institute of Social Sciences, Who's Black and Why: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. 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? Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. 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 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. 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. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." 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. And he mustered in in Winchester, Va., on Christmas Day, 1778, and was mustered down the Continental Army in April of 1784. And we filmed the whole thing. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. I regret we are out of time. Race is a social construction. Obama then held a much-publicized meeting with Gates and James Crowley, the officer who had arrested Gates, which became informally known as the beer summit because Obama invited the two for beers in the White House Rose Garden. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. 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 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. He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . Yeah. 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. Biology matters. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. 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. GROSS: Whoa. 22,158 talking about this. The daughter of prominent black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said her father's arrest last week at his Cambridge home has deeply saddened him. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. Advertisement As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. GATES: So obviously somebody gave her that money. 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. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. 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. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. But mutations exist. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. And consequently, you are now a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. Gates's prominence led to his being called as a witness on behalf of the controversial Florida rap group 2 Live Crew in an obscenity case. 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. GROSS: Is that too personal? On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. They were buried next to each other. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. This is FRESH AIR. 266. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. 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. But it's just not those two genetic lines. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
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