SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
How much do you really know about your ancestors? Maybe you know what countries they came from, what languages they spoke or what tribes they belonged to. But the details that help us understand someone - things like what they did, what they cared about, who they loved - those often get lost through the generations. And these questions are at the heart of the PBS show "Finding Your Roots." Each season, researchers trace the genealogical roots of celebrity guests using archival materials and DNA. They're guided through the findings by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor and the host of the show. Professor Gates, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR: Thank you. I love your show, and it's an honor to be on.
MCCAMMON: Well, it's an honor to have you. You have just started a new season, and there are some really interesting guests - actor America Ferrera, rapper Wiz Khalifa and professional basketball player Brittney Griner, just to name a few. Each episode features two guests and their family histories. You kind of toggle between them. How do you decide who to pair together for each episode?
GATES: In two ways - sometimes by occupation. So maybe we have two prominent chefs. Or in this case, we have Brittney Griner, as you mentioned, and Chris Paul, two basketball players, so we will group them together. But more likely, we group them internally by a theme that recurs on their family tree, and I find those quite exciting.
MCCAMMON: And your research often uncovers these untold stories and some surprising connections between people. Another of the season's guests, actress Sanaa Lathan, said she didn't expect it to be so spiritual, was the word she used. Why do you think it's so emotional for people?
GATES: You know, I think about that quite a lot. Your genome is a walking family tree. These people aren't gone. They're inside you. And I think that's a beautiful metaphor for rootedness and connectedness. And it turns out, nobody knows much about their ancestors beyond their grandparents or their great-grandparents. Often, they've heard stories which turn out to be myths, kind of like the game of telephone.
I didn't know, as Sanaa mentioned, how deeply spiritual this would be for people. And it's spiritual for people across the board, no matter what their national origins are or their religious preference or any other aspect of their identity, and it's deeply moving to me. It's like giving somebody a gift, and I love it, and it's an honor to be the host of this show.
MCCAMMON: But, you know, not all of these stories are heartwarming. I mean, some of them are pretty difficult to hear.
GATES: Oh.
MCCAMMON: Without giving away too much, Sanaa Lathan also learned about some of the specific ways her ancestors had suffered from racial discrimination.
GATES: Oh, her maternal great-grandfather was a real pioneer. His name was Wesley Deer McCoy, and he was born in Texas in 1879. And in 1907, he decided he wanted to be a veterinary medical doctor. And there are not that many Black vets today, you know, let alone over 100 years ago. And so he applied to the Grand Rapids Medical College in Michigan. He was admitted, along with another Black classmate named Felix Booker. They did very well in their first year. When they showed up for school in their second year, they were denied readmission because they were Black.
So what did they do? They sued. This is one of the early civil rights cases for education. They sued, and they won in court, incredibly. The NAACP was not even invented at that time. And when they returned to school, Wesley and Booker endured vicious racist backlash from their classmates, including an effigy hanging and a near-total class walkout. The college appealed the case, and the Michigan Supreme Court, if you can believe this, ultimately forced them out.
So what did Wesley do? You got to love this guy. He moved to Canada. He enrolled at the Ontario Veterinary College in the University of Toronto, completed his training and then returned to build a successful veterinary practice and family life in the United States. And so Sanaa realized for the first time that she had a civil rights pioneer and spiritual ancestor whose resilience and determination helped her, she said, better understand her own strength and identity.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, how do you talk to people when they're sitting across from you dealing with a complex or painful story?
GATES: Well, I tell them that guilt is not heritable, meaning, sometimes we find out that an ancestor committed a crime or did horrible things, and that's not your fault. Your life is not defined by what your ancestors did, the crimes they committed or their own shortsightedness. It's just part of the collective genetic and experiential soup that we all inherit. You're not confined by what your ancestor did.
So I try to cushion it as best I can. When a person descends from a slave owner, it's not your fault. I think that knowing that you are not responsible for the things your ancestor did frees you. You need this knowledge to understand more completely who you are, who your ancestors were, what your collective familial experiences are, but you're not predetermined by that.
MCCAMMON: I think a lot of us - as you said, a lot of people are curious about their family roots, whatever those may be. So for people who want to piece together their own history, is DNA - maybe a DNA test - a good place to start?
GATES: You take a DNA test. And I've been tested by everybody. Someone joked that I'm the most DNA-tested Black man in the history of the world. But you could go to the local genealogical society, and you could say, help me, help me get started. And there are a lot of online resources, too. But it's a lot easier than you think to begin to trace your ancestry. But my warning is once you do, it's addictive. It just - it's a way of understanding ourselves more fully and more completely.
We live in turbulent, chaotic times. We need foundations in order to cope. And the most important foundation one could have is knowledge about your ancestors because you're standing on the accomplishments and achievements of your biological kin, of the people whose DNA is floating around - not literally, but metaphorically - in your genome. And that's a marvelous thing to contemplate.
MCCAMMON: That was Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of "Finding Your Roots." The 12th season is out now. Thank you so much.
GATES: Thank you.
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