And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. In 2021, Gates was honored by PEN America with its Audible Literary Service Award. They were buried next to each other. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. [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. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. What do you think of that? Terry. 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? Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . And they fought in the Revolutionary War. JSTOR1208745. 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. But mutations exist. And if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. My mother was a seamstress, as you know. 7. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. We defended the right of every American to vote. 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. 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). Author Herb Boyd, who teaches African and African-American history at the College of New Rochelle and City College, CUNY, argued that despite the complicity of African monarchs in the Atlantic slave trade, the United States "was the greatest beneficiary, and thus should be the main compensator". GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. Advertisement 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. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. And I gave it to her for birthday. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. 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.. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of lecturer in Afro-American Studies, with the understanding that he would be promoted to assistant professor upon completion of his doctoral dissertation. )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. 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. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. 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. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. [citation needed] Gates has been criticized by John Henrik Clarke, Molefi Kete Asante, and the controversial Maulana Karenga, each of whom has been questioned by others in academia.[15][16][17]. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? What percent would be Native American? GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. 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. 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. In 2021, the National World War Two Museum recognized Gates with its American Spirit Award. 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. It's a lot of data to process. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. 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. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. 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. So I want to read something that you wrote about her. 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. What is race? The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. 4. 5. Thank God. GROSS: OK. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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). They had two geneticists. In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. [19], In 1995, Gates presented a program in the BBC series Great Railway Journeys (produced in association with PBS). Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. 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. 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. 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. They lived together. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). You have to get permission. "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: It's mind-boggling. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. 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. 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". He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. Mama - I'm sorry, Mama. All rights reserved. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Louis-Gates-Jr. African American Registry - Biography of Herny Louis Gates, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. 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. GROSS: Yeah. I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. They - but you're absolutely right. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. 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. GROSS: So you know your medical background and if you're GATES: Yeah. If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. That's the way it is. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. 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. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . It's - remember, it's - my father dragged my brother and me upstairs in his parents' home and made us wait why he'd look through half a dozen of his father's scrapbooks, about which we knew nothing - complete mystery, a secret to us - looking for that obituary. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born Sept. 16, 1950, in Keyser, W.Va. His father worked at the local paper mill during the day and as a janitor at a telephone company at night. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. He was there in exile because he had been in prison and to be offering civil war for 27 months and was given a fellowship at the University of Cambridge. But it's just not those two genetic lines. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden eventually extended an invitation to Gates and the Cambridge officer who was involved to share a beer with them at the White House, which they accepted. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. 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. 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. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? 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. OK. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. 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. Yeah. I hope you never come back, you know? You might have breast cancer. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. GROSS: Totally stunned. Except in the next scene, I showed him their headstones. 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. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. 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. Signifyin is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. 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. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. The "You. And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? In 1984, Gates was recruited by Cornell University with an offer of tenure; Gates asked Yale whether the university would match Cornell's offer, but they declined. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. GATES: I said, thank God. And I sat down. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. We'd spit in a test tube. Over . DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. His mother. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." 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. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. That's a long time when you're young. He also learned that one of his African ancestors includes a Yoruba man who was trafficked to America from Ouidah in present-day Republic of Benin. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. GROSS: Yeah. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. GROSS: Is that too personal? Of course not. All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. And at this point, I'd run over to my mother and say, Mama, I'll never pass for white, Mama. I'm going to be black. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). That belief is shared by Native groups that similarly objected to the Human Genome Diversity Project, as described in the work of Jenny Reardon and Kimberly TallBear.
Hole Punch Gladiators Actor, Ridgid Table Saw Serial Number Location, Succubus Powers And Abilities, Abcya 100 Games, East St Louis Monitor Newspaper Obituaries, Articles H