"[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. 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. 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: And then when they did my admixture, I'm 50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry, which really pisses my family off. And she throws herself on the casket. 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." And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. And then black people would tell each other - they would say, you know, be sure to watch "The Late Late Show" tonight because "Imitation Of Life," which is my favorite film - 1934, with Claudette Colbert. African-American - I love to joke about this. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. And remarkably, she's now able to. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. GATES: Don't you? And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. 9. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. 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. [7] In his major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, Gates expressed what might constitute an African-American cultural aesthetic. 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? In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. 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. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". 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. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. 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. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. I mean, they know Donald Trump. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? 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. In Root Worker, a short story by Edward P. Jones, a chronically ill African-American woman who migrated to Washington, D.C., from North Carolina returns to the South with her husband and daughter, a physician, in search of the cure that has eluded her for decades in the North. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. Brooke Williams. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. 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 could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. But I also watched TV. GROSS: Totally stunned. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Race is a social construction. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (@henrylouisgates) Instagram photos and videos henrylouisgates Verified Follow 519 posts 129K followers 173 following Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Dir. GROSS: And I read you talking about this. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. 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)? 10. They - but you're absolutely right. And you - the last scene is the funeral. Elizabeth had suffered a stroke, her mind irreparably harmed. 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). Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. - like the Aunt Jemima figure. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? 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). The "You. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. They flew him in from San Francisco. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. 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? And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. 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. Before the PBS episode, the world only knew that Vivian was reported to be of Sicilian heritage on her dads side, and German/Irish on her mothers side. GROSS: OK. 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. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. Omissions? His mother. And he'd make a couple - a move. And I hope they are. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. Gates is the host of the TV genealogy series "Finding Your Roots." GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. I only did black people. When my daughters were born, I had them tested for sickle cell because - black people are not the only people in the world that have sickle cell. And they fought in the Revolutionary War. 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. It comes from slavery. [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. GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. GATES: For which she paid cash. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. You have to get permission. One wishes that Gates, an inimitable literary scholar well before he became a pathbreaking Renaissance man, might have alluded to another of Edward P. Joness works, The Known World, a historical novel exploring life in an antebellum community in which both blacks and whites hold black slaves, by way of even partial explanation. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. 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. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. 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. Jakes and Chris Tucker. Over . 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. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. They had two geneticists. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. And they stayed home, and they read. 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. 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 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. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. 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. 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. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. "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. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. 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. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. And I gave it to her for birthday. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. Or they stayed home, and they drew. In front of all these people and all these viewers. . We are unable to fully display the content of this page. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. [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. 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. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. And she was a beautiful woman. So we knew he was Irish. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . The fruits of the unearthed family treehistorical coherence; redemptive narratives of migration and assimilation; intergenerational social mobilityare unevenly dispersed. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. 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? And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." 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. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. 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. I think you know where I'm heading here. There we go. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. February 12, 2010. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. 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. We defended the right of every American to vote. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. At one point, Johnny even told the KKK in a statement that Vivian was white. In 2021, Gates was honored by PEN America with its Audible Literary Service Award. 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. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. Jr. (Design School Visiting Committee 1984-89) in honor of their daughters, Brooke Higgins Bing Williams, Harvard College 1988, and Eden Branford Bing Williams, Harvard . Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. I hope you never come back, you know? It's beautiful. 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. GATES: And think about it. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. And consequently, you are now a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. 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). Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. And if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. ", 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 I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. GATES: But then they did another special test. 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. So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". So I'm out there. GATES: Yeah, yeah. 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. 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.
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