In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). American playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. But it's just not those two genetic lines. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. 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 . Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. As of February 2022, Gates, 71, serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.. 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. It's beautiful. African-American - I love to joke about this. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. And he fought in - for the Continental Army. 266. 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. 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. 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 October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. Gates is the host of the TV genealogy series "Finding Your Roots." We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. By Alondra Nelson. 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. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. There we go. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . In front of all these people and all these viewers. Opinion | The 'Lost Cause' That Built Jim Crow - The New York Times 6. Video of the day: Drake and 21 Savage's "Spin Bout U" NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA Clyde NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA ClydeTwo quintessential Lower East Side outposts celebrate the downtown staple sneaker.HypebeastDylan Kelly Culture: Henry Gates serves as the chair for the Selection Committee for the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship Program that is sponsored by the Fletcher Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Fletcher Asset Management. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. In the years that followed he earned a reputation as a literary archaeologist by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge - Boston Magazine And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. 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. In a February episode of the PBS show, "Finding Your Roots," host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Rosanne Cash with her DNA results and family genealogy. After that I would say I was a teacher. But on the other hand, Terry, there were a lot of people who never forgave the country for electing a black man to the White House. 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). I go, goodbye. Thank you for being you. Yeah. Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. You might have breast cancer. 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. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. 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? I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. And I wanted to be from them. Thank you. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. More than anyone else, the historian is responsible for "entertaining the idea remotely" that Gates could become a writer. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? The book tells of Gates's childhood growing up in the 1950s in a close-knit extended family and an equally close-knit small-town community. The fruits of the unearthed family treehistorical coherence; redemptive narratives of migration and assimilation; intergenerational social mobilityare unevenly dispersed. "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. GATES: Yeah, yeah. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. And he'd make a couple - a move. After that, everything stopped. 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. Isn't that a cool thing? I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. GATES: I said, thank God. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. 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. Some critics suggest that adding Black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists say that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in his advocacy of integration of the canon. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. And my brother went off to dental school. 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. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. Gates graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1968 and attended a local junior college before enrolling at Yale University, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1973. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. You have to get permission. Mama - I'm sorry, Mama. GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. And I was shocked by that. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. "My father was so sad. So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. 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. GROSS: Totally stunned. 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). GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? 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. And if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. 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. 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. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published. Or they stayed home, and they drew. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. 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? He earned his B.A. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . 1. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). 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. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? Does race exist? 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. 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. You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. We'll hear more after a short break. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. 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. 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. 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. 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? Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. And I think that that's sad. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. 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. GROSS: So when you had your DNA done, did you have a wish for a certain area of Africa or a certain group of African people who you wanted to be your ancestors? . This is called an admixture test. 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. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. They lived together. 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. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. On DNA Testing And Finding His Own Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. So we knew he was Irish. In "Root Worker," a short . After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Losing His Mother, the Heirloom He Adores And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. It's a gift - and for my mom. [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. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. 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. His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). And remarkably, she's now able to. GATES: For which she paid cash. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? My Daddy, the Jailbird - The Daily Beast He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? | The US Sun GROSS: Is that too personal? The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. 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? Season 8. And I loved the news. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, His mother. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. 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. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. His mother cleaned houses. He was a free negro, as we would have said then. 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. 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). Soyinka persuaded Gates to study literature instead of history; he also taught him much about the culture of the Yoruba, one of the largest Nigerian ethnic groups. [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. The fifth season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. The current PBS documentary miniseries Faces of America traces the family histories of 12 prominent people who, over the course of several hours and with the aid of conventional and genetic genealogy, come to fasten their varied tribulations and successes to the arc of ancestry. Gates traced the practice of signifyin to Esu, the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, and to the figure of the signifying monkey, with which Esu is closely associated. 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Recipients Announced GROSS: OK. 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? GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. Corrections? Professor Gates is the host of the documentary " Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. This is FRESH AIR. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. Wants W. E. B. DuBois, Wole Soyinka and Phyllis Wheatley on the Nation's Reading Lists, As Well As Western Classics like Milton and Shakespeare". 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). But mutations exist. What percent would be from Europe? GROSS: So you know your medical background and if you're GATES: Yeah. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. )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. In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. 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. Henry Louis Gates Jr. - Wikipedia Updates? They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - The National Endowment for the Humanities And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. 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. So everybody knew that this whole thing was building to the climax when Delilah - is her name - the character. Rosanne Cash became tearful after learning that her mom, Vivian Liberto Cash, had a Black great-great grandmother who was subjected to a life of slavery. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. 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. And I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line.