Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Britannica You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? It doesn't exist. Signifyin is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. Gates's critically acclaimed six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, traced 500 years of African-American history to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. 6.4K views 13 years ago Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates, takes a few minutes to call CNN from Martha's Vineyard and talk to Don Lemon about the. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. We defended the right of every American to vote. I think you know where I'm heading here. The show makes use of gene-sequencing techniques that have become widely available since African American Lives first aired, like whole-genome sequencing, which entails the mapping of all six billion base pairs in a persons DNA. His name was John Redman. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. He introduced the notion of signifyin to represent African and African American literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. They had two geneticists. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. And that night - and then daddy showed my brother and me, Dr. Paul Gates now, chief of dentistry at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital GATES: Well, it's the spirit of my mother. They were buried next to each other. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. It was just misdiagnosed. They lived together. 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.. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. 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. (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). 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. of Hutchins Center at @harvard. The minister would call on her. What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? | The US Sun 2. And he'd make a couple - a move. GROSS: And then your slightly more contemporary ancestors not having any rights in the country, you know, or very few rights - not being able to vote, having to live in segregation. That's the way it is. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard - The Boston Globe You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. This is FRESH AIR. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . 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)? GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. This is FRESH AIR. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. Theyve Had an Inappropriate Relationship For Months, How Black Creators Can Expand Their Network with LinkedIn. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. You might have prostate cancer that runs in your family. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. No one's ever asked me that, but the answer's yes because I studied with a person who has been on your show, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, when I went to the University of Cambridge. And my brother went off to dental school. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . Both would be just as important. 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? And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. And we'd have the chess board set up. 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. Gates' Daughter Speaks Out - YouTube 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". You have to get permission. GATES: Yeah, yeah. 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. GROSS: OK. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. So we knew he was Irish. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. Of course not. 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". GATES: No. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. His mother. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. . 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. GATES: Otherwise they wouldn't be in a database. What do you think of that? 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. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 10. In July 2022, Gates announced that he would serve as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a new glossary of language that will contain popular phrases used by historical Black figures and modern-day Black Americans. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. 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. Gatess own genealogical narrative, unfurled against the backdrop of images of his family gathering in the kitchen or tender interactions with his nonagenarian father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., is also quite moving. He argues, "It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,"[13] adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). Does race exist? By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. 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. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. In 2006, Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary "African American Lives," the first documentary series to use genealogy and genetic science to provide an understanding of African-American history. One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. It was a horrible, horrible thing. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. or subscribe. And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. He was a free negro, as we would have said then. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. 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? "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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (@henrylouisgates) - Instagram And she throws herself on the casket. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. 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). Advertisement You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? [29] His op-ed begins and ends with the observation that it is very difficult to decide whether or not to give reparations to the descendants of American slaves, whether they should receive compensation for the unpaid labor of their ancestors, and their lack of rights. Or they stayed home, and they drew. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show."