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. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. "We deconstruct ethnic identities to show that when the lights came down, everyone was sleeping with everyone else -- that's the way human history goes!" . GROSS: But it's making me think of how much death figured into your formative thoughts - the death of your grandfather, which led you to see the picture of your great-great-grandmother, everybody's deaths through your mother memorialized in those obituaries. It was astonishing. African-American - I love to joke about this. GATES: That's true. In 2020, Gates was honored with the Louis Stokes Community VisionaryAward. Biology matters. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. By Alondra Nelson. 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. A white doctor misdiagnosed the injury as psychosomatic after Gates told him he wanted to become a doctor, Gates wrote in a New York Times article, "About Men: A Giant Step," in 1990. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. 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. 266. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. We'll hear more after a short break. I love you being black. 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. 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. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. 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. In July 2009 Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct: After returning from traveling abroad, Gates had forced open the door to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which precipitated a call to police from a neighbour who believed a robbery might be underway. He is on the boards of many notable institutions, including the, In 2010, Gates became the first African American to have his, In December 2014, Gates was announced as one of 14 recipients of a 2015. He has insisted that Black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the Black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism". Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. But I saw that photograph and read her obituary on the day that we buried my father's father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. 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: 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? He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. So I'm out there. But mutations exist. GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. How 'Finding Your Roots' became a cultural phenomenon Race is a social construction. 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. Sunday Notes - uristocrat.com Thank God. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. For example, while haplogroupssets of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are gene-sequence variants that are inherited together and categorized by letter and number (A, L3D, R, U5b, etc. 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. And they fought in the Revolutionary War. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. James . (Note: Clotel (1853) by William Wells Brown is recognized as the first novel published by an African-American author, but it was both written and published in London.) "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. 3. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. 1. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. But it's just not those two genetic lines. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. And my brother went off to dental school. In addition to Rosanne, Vivian and Johnny welcomed three other daughters: Cindy, Kathy and Tara. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. They had two geneticists. 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. The fruits of the unearthed family treehistorical coherence; redemptive narratives of migration and assimilation; intergenerational social mobilityare unevenly dispersed. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . 8. GROSS: Yeah. So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". 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. "[13] After his 2003 NEH lecture, Gates published in the same year a book entitled The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, about the early African-American poet. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. OK. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. 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? And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? What percent would be from Europe? Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Cambridge MA - Facebook [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. 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. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . This is FRESH AIR. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. [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. 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.. 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. 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. These American faces, we learn, are the descendants of colonialists, aboriginals, overseers, bondspeople, interned citizens, and religious pilgrims. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. "My father was so sad. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. 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: I've interviewed many people over the years.