Henry Louis Gates delves into celebs' genealogy on PBS

I will take a Henry Louis Gates over a Cornell West any day.

This guy is awsome, but he still hangs out with some bad folks!
born September 16, 1950, Piedmont, West Virginia Mineral County) is an educator, scholar, literary critic, writer, editor of Transition Magazine and the chair of Harvard's African and African American Studies department.

Gates earned a BA summa cum laude from Yale University and a Ph.D. in English from Clare College, Cambridge University. After teaching at Yale, he was denied tenure, passed over in favor of the distinguished literary critic Robert Stepto. Gates and his frequent collaborator, Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, decamped to Cornell University, then to Duke University before settling at Harvard, where Gates is the W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and teaches primarily in the AAAS and English departments. In 1994 Gates received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College.

Gates has applied structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics. He hosted America Beyond the Color Line and African American Lives for PBS.

He originated the application of the concept of "signifyin(g)" to African-American literary criticism and history. In 1981, Gates was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

In 1997 Gates was voted one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans."

In recent years Gates has become a strong supporter of Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani's All Stars Project, a controversial youth charity based in New York City. In 2005, Gates joined the board of directors of All Stars.


ANYONE WHO'S ever dragged a finger across the name of a grandparent or great-grandparent who disembarked at Ellis Island, or studied the faded pages of a family Bible listing the births, deaths and marriages of long-dead ancestors knows the thrill of history made personal.

Beyond a certain point, though, it's a thrill that's been denied to many African-Americans, whose ancestral ties are sometimes assumed to be untraceable, their family connections severed by slavery and their original homelands lost to history.
Except that that's not true.

Thanks in part to the Mormon church's intense interest in genealogy, a growing number of records documenting the comings and goings of all sorts of people, both free and enslaved, are being rediscovered and many put online, even as geneticists offer an intriguing glimpse of the possibilities of the past through DNA.
Those increased research opportunities are the main message of PBS' two-night, four-hour exploration of "African American Lives," which not coincidentally is launching at the beginning of Black History Month.
The other message?

It helps to be famous.

Because how many of us, of any color, can expect to have Henry Louis Gates Jr. doing our genealogical legwork for us?
Gates, chairman of Harvard's African and African American Studies department and host of this, as well as past PBS series "America Beyond the Color Line" and "Wonders of the African World," isn't afraid to use celebrity connections to make a point, which is why among the eight prominent African-Americans whose family trees he helps trace in the series are household names like Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Whoopi Goldberg and Chris Tucker.

"I was trying to seduce high school and elementary school kids into science and into historical research," Gates explained to reporters last month in Pasadena, Calif., as he sat on a dais with Dr. Mae Jemison - the first African-American woman in space - and mega-church pastor Bishop T.D. Jakes, each of whom possesses a family history that rivals Winfrey's for sheer fascination.

"I didn't know anything about these people except that I admired them. I wanted people representing a wide variety of occupations," Gates said. "So I didn't want to reinforce stereotypes about entertainers and athletes. But I wanted them to be seductive enough so people would actually watch."
I think a lot of people will find Jemison, Jakes, pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson - a Yale classmate of Gates' - and Gates' Harvard colleague, Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, every bit as seductive, if not more so, than they do the four entertainers Gates rounded up, but I take his point.

Perhaps if he didn't come across at times like a graduate of the James "Actors Studio" Lipton School of Celebrity Interviewing - or if he'd just stop referring to his subjects as his "guests," as if what they were participating in weren't a documentary but some very long talk show - I could get past the celebrity thing.
Because, at the very least, we know that these people are famous and successful not for who their distant ancestors were but for who they themselves are, and in some cases despite who their parents were.

Unfortunately, tonight's first installment bogs down a bit in those more immediate ties, particularly as Winfrey recites the details of her admittedly horrific childhood, a story that may be losing some of its power through repetition.
The fun - and there's a surprising amount of fun in Gates' sometimes meandering journey toward his and his subjects' roots - really begins in next week's installments, as science comes up against family traditions, and several people are forced to face some unexpected truths about their histories, whether it be Native American ties they'd taken for granted that don't show up in DNA or Winfrey being told that, no, she is not, as she has publicly declared in the past, part Zulu.
(If you think this isn't fun to watch, then imagine the look on the faces of your family's amateur genealogists were you to produce DNA tests over your next Thanksgiving dinner that proved that, well, you and they probably aren't descended from William the Conqueror, or that "Indian princess" Grandpa was always talking about.)

One of the most surprised subjects is Gates himself, who, though aware of at least one white ancestor, still seems astonished to learn that fully half his DNA indicates European ancestry, and some of it from the female line, meaning not all of it can be attributed to a slave owner.
"What does that mean? Does that make me less black? I had to ask all those questions," he said.

Meanwhile, another DNA test apparently put the kibosh on a long-held tradition that the Gates family was linked by blood to a white family named Brady.
Not that DNA meant much to Gates' 92-year-old father.
"My father's response, which was cut out of the film, was, 'Bull- - - -,' " Gates recalled.
"He said, 'I don't care about no test. I've been a Brady all my life, and I'm going to stay a Brady.