I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. GROSS: OK. On your mother's side, you found out that you had three men in the family who were freed slaves - freed before 1776. He loved the news. GATES: admixture, I'm 50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry, which really pisses my family off. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. ". He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). In "Root Worker," a short . And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. GROSS: And it's a way of outing people as not being who they think they are and not recognizing that we're all descended from so many different people. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. "My father was so sad. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. 2. And I was exhilarated. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. 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). And most DNA companies in the United States will tell you that they have never tested an African-American who is 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa. GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. You might have prostate cancer that runs in your family. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. African-American - I love to joke about this. And you got this from the 1870 census - (reading) that Jane Gates, age 51, female, mulatto, laundress and nurse, owns real estate valued at $1,400; born in Maryland; cannot read or write. [10] At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he was appointed to in 2006, and as a professor of English. GROSS: Huge story. And I loved the news. GROSS: Whoa. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. GATES: OK. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. Race is a social construction. GATES: Yeah. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. GROSS: And it made me think about - because I was just reading this - it made me think about how a president can set the tone for the country on so many things, including, you know, racial issues, immigration. Sgt. This is FRESH AIR. 4. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. It's beautiful. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. Alondra Nelson is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. 10. I found the first edition when I was an adult. It was astonishing. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. In 2021, Gates was honored by PEN America with its Audible Literary Service Award. James . 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. Each of the genetic analyses used in Facesadmixture analysis, haplotype grouping, and relative mappingincorporate underlying assumptions and algorithms that may be incompatible with the other techniques. 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. His work has rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.[12]. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. I can do it. Then he'd come back. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. 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. But I saw that photograph and read her obituary on the day that we buried my father's father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. 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". Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. GATES: But then they did another special test. And so then they came in - this is a big deal back in 2008. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. Historical evidence suggests that intraracial slavery was uncommon, and that when it did occur, sometimes free men and women of color purchased enslaved relatives and friends to rescue them from the cruelty of the chattel system, if not the social death of slave status. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller. 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. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. However, in the 60s amid the Civil Rights Movement, Vivian had been the target of attention from white supremacists since they believed she looked Black. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. I'm going to be black. In addition to Rosanne, Vivian and Johnny welcomed three other daughters: Cindy, Kathy and Tara. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. GATES: Well, the average African-American GATES: The average African-American is 24 percent European. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". [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. Yeah. All rights reserved. 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. Or they stayed home, and they drew. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. 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. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. We're all admixed. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. That's a long time when you're young. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. It's a gift - and for my mom. 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 when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? And they fought in the Revolutionary War. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? 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. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. I killed my mama. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. 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.. So I'm out there. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. After that, everything stopped. 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. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. The furor over the recent arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. erupted again Thursday following sharp criticism of the Cambridge Police Department by President Obama. 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. Professor Gates is the host of the documentary " Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The minister would call on her. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. Brub, Michael (Spring 1994). But they came from someplace else. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from.

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