PBS Series Examines Blending Of Races, Cultures In U.S.
on January 28th, 2006 at 12:36 pmBy ROGER CATLIN, Courant.com
{Excerpted}
When he employed DNA testing to find the roots of prominent African Americans for a new genealogy show on PBS for Black History Month, Henry Louis Gates Jr. couldn’t resist looking into his own family’s past.
What he found surprised him: The W.E.B. Du Bois professor of humanities and chair of the African and African American Studies Department at Harvard University was half white.
“Oh, man. It was the long dark night of the soul,” Gates says about the discovery, joking: “what about my reparation check? I have to give away half of my reparation check? All that affirmative-action money – I have to give it back. It’s terrible. It’s very embarrassing to me.”
Gates, who hosts and produced “African American Lives,” a four-hour, two-part series that begins Wednesday on PBS, says he knew his family had some white blood in it. But by administering one of the scientific tests in the program, he found that his father is 67 percent white and that he’s 50 percent white.
“What does that mean? Does that make me less black? I had to ask all those questions,” Gates says. “And, no, I mean, I’m very secure in my African American identity. It just means that African Americans and European Americans have been inextricably intertwined on the most intimate level from day one in this country.”(more…)
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