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Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. |
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Gates, Henry
Louis, Jr.
In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed
Their Past. NY: Crown, 2009.
Introduction: Family Matters
5 . . .
searching for my ancestry was always a fraught process, always a mix of joy,
frustration, and outrage, as the reconstruction of their history—individually
and collectively—must always be for any African American. I knew I had white
ancestors. My father was clearly part white, and his father looked like a
not-so-friendly version of
6 For us, for
those of us descended from the 455,000 Africans who arrived in this country
directly from Africa and indirectly from the Caribbean as slaves—80 percent of
whom had arrived here by 1800, 99.7 percent by 1820—it was the “trace-ability,”
as it were, that the evil genius of slavery sought to take away from us on
both
sides of the Atlantic, making us fragmented and not whole, isolated, discrete
parts, not pieces of fabric stitched together in a grand pattern, like some
living, breathing, mocha-colored quilt.
8 . . . the vast majority of us can trace at least one line
of our family back to the 1870 census, which was the first census taken after
the Civil War and is thus the first census in which all our ancestors appear as
people, as citizens with two names, as opposed to property, with no names.
9 The
roots of African American family trees extend only so far as the shores of the
10 Lost
until recently, that is. In the past decade, remarkable developments in DNA
testing and the retrieval and digitalization of archival records have
made it possible for us to begin to trace our families back further through
American history and, then, ultimately across the Atlantic. For the first time
since the seventeenth century, we are able, symbolically at least, to reverse
the Middle Passage. . . . With cells collected from the insides of our mouths,
geneticists can extract small sections of our DNA. The bases of the acids within
them form distinctive sequences know as haplotypes, which can then be compared
to DNA samples taken from other people around the world. A match means that
we’ve found someone with whom we share a common ancestor. And back in
12 Restoring the stories of the lives of the members of our
extended families can directly transform the way that historians reassemble the
larger narrative of the history of our people.
12 . . . perhaps the surprising secret of African American
genealogy is that every aspect of every family story, no matter how seemingly
trivial or insignificant, can be a revelation that reshapes how we understand
the entire sweep of the black experience in America.
Prefatory Notes on the African Slave Trade
16 Though the practices of slave owners varied, sometimes
significantly, in different eras and in different states and in different times,
slavery was, almost everywhere, a systemic effort to rob black human beings of
their very humanity itself—that is, of all the aspects of civilization that make
a human being “human”: names, birth dates, family ties, the freedom to be
educated and to worship, and the most basic sense of self-knowledge and
continuity of generations within one’s direct family.
17 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database . . . a compilation of
the records kept by shipping companies involved in the slave trade. It offers
detailed information on 34,941 transatlantic slave-trading voyages that occurred
between 1514 and 1866. Compiled under the direction of David Eltis, with the
collaboration of Stephen D. Behrendt, Monolo Florentino, and David Richardson,
it is the largest uniform, consolidated database of its kind in the world.
According to
the database, before the slave trade ended in the
18 In fact,
more than half of us had ancestors living in the
19
Fifteen hundred languages are spoken on the African continent today. But the
ancestors of the African American people are surprisingly localized.
Linda Heywood and John Thornton have recently estimated that about fifty ethnic
groups in
20 Over the years the
blending of their different
ethnicities created the rich mixture—the pan-African identity—that is
African American culture today. . . . There were also, of course,
interracial mixtures with whites and with Native Americans—over half the African
American people today have at least one European great grandfather,
while that figure for a Native American great-grandparent is much, much less,
amounting to only about 5 percent—and all this intermixture contributes to who
we are today when we describe ourselves as “African Americans.”
20
5 percent of African Americans have at least
12.5 percent
Native American ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
21
58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5
percent European ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
21
19.6 percent of African Americans have at least 25
percent European ancestry (equivalent of one grandparent).
21 1 percent of African Americans have at least 50 percent
European ancestry (equivalent of one parent).
21
2.7 percent of European Americans have at least
12.5 percent Native American Ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
21
Less than 1 percent of European Americans have at
least 12.5 percent West African ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
21 After
37
Well over half of all African American people have a white
ancestor. And while some are bothered by it, in my experience most, like Maya,
are not, which is, I think, an interesting indicator of
how willing we
are as a people to accept the racial complexity of our family histories rather
than to pretend to some sort of claim of African purity or embrace embarrassment
at how mixed our genetic makeup actually is.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
Faces of
1-2 After I
joined the rest of
2 . . . the science of genetics could do for all African
Americans that which Alex Haley had done for himself: effectively reverse the
Middle Passage to recover every black family’s long-lost ancestral origins on
the African continent. To say that I was excited by this possibility is an
understatement.
4 [
5 . . . fully 35 percent of all other African American men
can also trace their paternal ancestors, their Y-DNA, to European men who
impregnated an African American female, most probably in the context of slavery.
5 It turns out that
the four or five “races” that
scholars postulated back then have absolutely no basis in biology. But it also
turns out that genetic variations among individuals are real and biologically
identifiable—and are infinitely more complex than anyone could have
imagined in the eighteenth century.
6 In
7 . . .
America is a giant ethnic mishmash—a series of
interlocking families, like my own, that are so thoroughly blended that any
notion of racial purity is naïve at best and a dangerous intellectual error at
worst.
8 Between 1820
and 1924, no fewer than thirty-six million people migrated to the
8 Yet immigrants themselves have routinely faced
discrimination, outright hostility, and sometimes severe hardships on the way to
earning the right to call themselves Americans.
