Henry Louis Gates Jr.
2024-01-25 01:56:55
Hi, I’m Dax Shepard, and I love talking to people. I am endlessly fascinated by the messiness of being human, and I find people who are vulnerable and honest about their struggles and shortcomings to be incredibly sexy. I invite you to join me as I explore other people’s stories. We will celebrate, above all, the challenges and setbacks that ultimately lead to growth and betterment. What qualifies me for such an endeavor? More than a decade of sobriety, a degree in Anthropology and four years of improv training. I will attempt to discover human “truths” without any laboratory work, clinical trials or data collection. I will be, in the great tradition of 16th-century scientists, an Armchair Expert.
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by the Minister of Duluth, the Duchess of Duluth.
Did you see any mice on your trip?
No mice, but I did see the evidence of when said mice were at play while the cat was away because they did eat back of one of the couch cushions. So whenever they were removed for Aaron to pull up a hide-a-bed, they would be up on the counter and I would see where those little mice had been gnawing away at it.
You don't think there was a new mouse?
There's definitely not new mice, no, because there's foods around and we would have heard them.
I told you I would have a talk with them, and I did.
I appreciate it so much, because they were not in the dunes with us at all.
Okay, good.
Today we have Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. He's an award-winning filmmaker, a literary scholar, a journalist, and a cultural critic. He's been teaching at Harvard. This is a ballpark, I probably said it in the interview, but I think he's 30 years into teaching at Harvard, yeah.
His books include Stony, the Road, Colored People, a Memoir, and The Signifying Monkey. He has two new docs that are dropping right now, season 10 of Finding Your Roots on PBS, and he also has Gospel, which is also coming out on PBS right quick. Both sensational. He is so good at both of those things.
This was such a fun interview.
It was, it was like having a history lesson.
Yeah, I loved it, but like so dynamic and he's a very special person.
Yes, and he was sitting in a position we've never experienced. He was much closer to us because he was in a chair for his back or something. Yeah. Yeah, and he was quite close to us, which I enjoyed. It was more like having a meal with him then.
It was, and also it's funny because he comes up on this show a fair amount.
Yes, so many of our guests have been and done his show.
Yeah, Kerry Washington, that was a huge part of her interview.
Ends up becoming a book. Yeah, so it's fun. So it's about time he was here. Please enjoy Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
This episode is brought to you by Vital Farms. Gosh, I love Vital Farms. I was just traveling with a katrillion pack of Vital Farms eggs.
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It's so great to have you here.
It's great to meet you. Man, you have a nice house.
Oh, thank you so much. I got a proper hillbilly compound here in the middle of Los Angeles.
See, I'm from West Virginia, so I understand.
My whole family's from rural Kentucky. I grew up in Detroit, so we're the only family in this neighborhood that has 20 cars in the yard and a motor home and dirt bikes.
But you need a washing machine. I do need a washer. With a ringer.
Big time, on the porch.
And a refrigerator.
Yes, yes. And then, comedically, an enormous satellite dish, which is also his present.
You know, I'd like to, I have a stenosis, so I would prefer to sit on a hard chair. Is that possible? Oh, so, this, probably. Like a straight-up chair. More like a desk chair.
A desk chair. You know, at a right angle. If that could make it work. This is to your liking. That's great.
We had a screening last night, excuse me,
of LeVar Burton.
You know, LeVar Burton?
Yes, yes, for Reading Rainbow.
Yeah, are you in the Reading Rainbow generation? I am, yeah. He has three generations of fans. Roots, that's me. Yeah.
Reading Rainbow, the two. Yeah. And then Star Trek, of course.
Yeah, that's true. He's sort of run the gambit. I think Kristen is friends with him, too. Oh, really? Mm-hmm.
Let's see if he can get my girls. Oh, great. Another challenge, to get the last generation.
Exactly. Yeah, that's right. So we started doing screening episodes of Finding Your Roots at Loyola, Marymount.
Oh, okay.
And 500 people.
And is it the first time they're seeing it?
Yeah, well, Angela Davis, the revolutionary, she wanted to see hers in advance. And I didn't want her to go off and go black on me in the middle of fucking 500 people. Sure, sure, sure. But LeVar didn't want to see his. He wept like a baby.
Oh. Yeah, and then he sat next to me while we watched. Then we did a one-on-one, and he cried all over again. Oh, my gosh. No, it was fantastic.
One of the great experiences of my life, so.
How wonderful. And that was at Loyola? Yeah. Okay, so we're on, in theory. Crying's gotta be a good signal when you do your job right.
The money shot.
We might, yes, we must.
For us, too, by the way.
Yes, I think we might share that in common. That's why I brought that up. I'm not after it, but obviously, when it happens, I go like, oh, that's really special.
It's a real moment.
Connection, yeah, something occurred, that's real.
I had to learn pacing, timing with a guest. You know, when we sit down, our reveals last four hours or five hours.
Right, we're seeing an edited 48-minute version. Okay, yeah, 30 minutes.
Because we always do two guests per episode. When I started, it was called African American Lives. I only did black guests. My whole intent was to replicate what Alex Haley purported to have done.
Forgive me, I don't know who Alex Haley is.
Alex Haley wrote Roots, and then LeVar was Kunta Kinte in Roots in 1977.. So Alex Haley is co-terminus with African American genealogy, with black people finding their roots in Africa. Are you old enough to know about the go-back machine? No. Oh my God.
Tell me about the go-back machine.
Oh, I think it was called the go-back machine. You could go back in time.
Okay, and it was a show?
Yeah, it was a show. It was a cartoon show.
Oh, okay, okay.
Maybe somebody can Google.
We do a fact check after this?
It'll be a part of the fact check for sure.
Alex was able to reverse the Middle Passage, go back to Africa, and find the village where he came from on his mother's line. This was every African American's dream. So I conceived a documentary series for PBS that did what he purported to do scientifically, in a laboratory, in a test tube. That was the whole conceit. And it aired in 2006,.
and Oprah, Quincy, Chris Tucker, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, because I didn't want to just show business people, in a different range of phenotypes. Black people, come in a thousand shades of brown. Yeah. We're a real rainbow coalition of sepias.
So I wanted to stress that as well. And we were revealing something to one of the guests, I can't remember which one, and they didn't cry. And my producer, Osaka Gladshow, at the time when we were doing an analysis, I said, why didn't they cry? I mean, it was such a moving revelation. And she said, because you stepped on their line.
You didn't give them enough space. Oh. And I was mortified. And I had to learn to count. I had another producer who said, put your head down, shut your eyes, and count to five, because they are getting so much information.
And the information is so emotional that you have to let them process it. And that's what I've learned to do. And last night, a rabbi, after the screening of LeVar Burton and Wes Studi's episode, he congratulated me on giving people their space to respond. And I said, I owe it to two producers who said, just take a breath, just let them process. And it seemed like an interminable amount of time to me.
But for them, it was just seconds.
Oh, yeah. I had to learn this same exact lesson. But what helped us was we have an audio format. So whereas you can give space, and there's a million things being said by the closeup of the guest on their face, in this format, it's dead. There's nothing there.
So, before we edited, this show started out and it was just live. And I had that kind of neurotic sense of filling all the gaps. And then, once we started editing, I think we both got, well, me, I was the main offender, got more comfortable in just letting things live. But it's still hard. There's this codependent urge to comfort, fill the space, prevent awkwardness.
You know, there's a lot of human stuff that's going on while you're still trying to conduct this other thing. A lot of bad habits for me.
Well, an example is the fact that, while you were just speaking, I nodded my head at least three different segments. These are all cues that you're trying to draw them out, right, you're trying to keep them going. You're trying to let people know that you're listening and you don't know what the hell is going on in their head. I have the pleasure of introducing you to stories you never dreamed of, but which are not only relevant to the person that you've become, but, genetically, the stories about these people are embedded in your genome. You've inherited DNA from them.
You are a walking family tree. Yes. Back 500 years. That's amazing.
That's crazy.
Or mitochondrial Eve, all the way back to Africa. I mean, literally, it's all there. It's history before history.
It's a form of immortality. Yeah. For your ancestors living in the last six generations, if we take 30 years as a generation, you actually inherit DNA from each of those. And that's a lot of ancestors. The first time I did my family tree, I was nine years old.
For me, a family tree was my father's line, my mother's line. That's right. It never occurred to me that the leaves and branches in the tree are relevant to my, they're my roots. The branches of the tree. Pick a better metaphor.
We go top down.
Yeah, right. So you have your father's, mother's, father's, mother's line. And your number of ancestors doubles each generation. So you actually have 64 fourth grade grandparents. You have two parents, you have four grandparents, you have eight great-grandparents, you have 16 great-grandparents.
You have 32 third great-grandparents and 64 fourth great-grandparents. Now, for me as an African-American, I'm extraordinary lucky in two ways. I know the identities of six of my fourth great-grandparents.
Wow.
Two sets were freed by the American Revolution. And the third set was freed in the will of a man named Abraham Van Meter in 1823.. And the punchline is, now. I grew up in the hills of Eastern West Virginia, in the Allegheny Mountains, on the Potomac River. Not exactly a hotbed of African-American culture.
You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, right. The only thing we could get on the radio, a.m. in the daytime was W.W.V.A. Country music.
Yeah. Right, right. 50,000 watts. And then the black music would sneak in. After the sun went down, the Black States from the south, we'd be able to pick them up through a.m.
But when I started the series, I'm looking east, toward Africa. I want to replicate Alex Haley. I want my Kunta Kente moment. And when they did my family tree, it turned out that the most interesting thing and the most deeply moving thing that they found was all these generations of African-Americans who were free since the American Revolution or shortly after, and who lived 30 miles from where I was born.
No. No kidding.
My family never moved from the hollows of the hills of eastern West Virginia. And you're a country boy. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, deep, deep roots.
I didn't have to look to Senegal or Angola. Yeah. Or Nigeria. I had to look at Moorfield.
Different counties.
Yeah, Moorfield and Hardy County. And I grew up right on the Maryland-West Virginia border of the Potomac River. The first day of deer season, school holiday.
Yep, exactly. Same in my town, yeah.
When you're 12, you get a 410.. Uh-huh. You know, the people there wrapped themselves up in the Second Amendment, and they have no idea why anybody would want to ban guns. But you know what? I'm 73 years old, and I lived there 24-7 until I was 18..
I went off to college, went off to Yale. Up to that time, I never heard of one person shooting another person. And everybody had guns. Now, I don't want to come off like I'm defending. I believe in gun control.
I think we're out of control. But nobody had an AK-47 to shoot a deer. Exactly.
No one's wearing Kevlar out there. They were wearing an orange vest. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
And doing their best not to shoot a cow. Right. Which was mistaken for a deer. That happened more often. Right.
So I grew up in this counterintuitive, but deeply rooted African-American rural culture, which doesn't fit in the textbooks. The history books don't generally write about the kind of black experience that I experienced. And so I have very deep roots, which were right under my feet. Right. And I had to go to Yale, go to Cambridge, England, get a PhD, come back, get a job at Harvard as a professor, wake up in the middle of the night, basically through a dream, get the idea for finding your roots, then become the most DNA-tested black man in the history of the world, only to find that my roots were right under my feet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They were under your nose, as we would say. I know. If they were a snake, they would have bit you.
You got it. Isn't that amazing? Yes. It's so incredible.
Let's go back to there, though. Nine years old, you do the first family tree. Was that like a school exercise?
On July 2nd, 1960, Edward St. Lawrence Gates died. He was my father's father. He looked like a white man. He was so white, we called him Casper behind his back.
Oh, my gosh. Grandpa Casper?
You guys too young to know about Casper. Oh, I know Casper. The friendly guy. Yeah, yes.
I mean, his skin was translucent. There were only two of us, my brother, Paul, who's an oral surgeon, retired now, and me, the baby, and Daddy, who also looked like a white man. He was often mistaken for Jewish. He even went to a Jewish school for a while in Newark, New Jersey.
He worked in a paper mill?
He worked in the paper mill in the daytime and was a janitor at the telephone company in the evening. But his aunt married a dentist. She went to Howard University and became a nurse at the beginning of the 20th century. Wow. Oh, wow.
My father was the seventh son and was really brilliant. So they brought him up there to live, and he went to a public school in Newark, and most of the kids were Jewish. So he goes to school on Yom Kippur, and the teacher says, what are you doing here? It's Yom Kippur. And my daddy said, what?
Yom Kippur? What is that? He realized? they thought he was Jewish.
He was like, why isn't anyone here? Is it deer season up here?
You got it. So Daddy took my brother and me up to the open casket at his father's funeral. It's July 2nd, 1960 in Cumberland, Maryland, which is 25 miles from the little town in West Virginia in which I grew up. All the gazes are from Cumberland, also in the Potomac River. All the Colemans, my mother's family, are from Piedmont, which is across the river from the paper mill.
And all the gazes are still in Cumberland, Maryland, going back to the oldest gates, which is what this story's about. So I had never been that close to a corpse before, and my grandfather looked ridiculously white. I mean, if he looked like Casper with blood coursing through his veins, you can imagine how white he looked dead. He looked like he had been coated with alabaster and sprinkled with baby powder.
He identified, though, as African-American.
He was a race man, yeah. And he didn't try to pass. But we've had people in the Gates family who did pass.
Well, just, I think it's relevant for backstory. You did ultimately figure out that you have 50% European ancestry.
That's right.
With some Irish folks in there.
50% European and 50% sub-Saharan African.
50, wow.
And so I was just freaked out, being that close to a corpse and also looking at this alabaster-coated man who was my grandfather. So that was very traumatic. So then we went to the Rose Hill Episcopal Cemetery, the Gateses were Episcopal, and buried my grandfather. And all the Gateses are buried there. And we came back to my grandparents' house and Daddy took Rocky, my brother, and me upstairs to his parents' bedroom.
And we'd never even been upstairs in this house because you couldn't do that. You know, things were very formal. then. Couldn't go upstairs in your grandparents' house. Couldn't sit on a bed.
You couldn't step on a grave. And you definitely could not call an adult by their first name. My parents are gone. Their parents are gone. And if I'm telling a story about Mr.
Ozzie, I'm still calling him Mr. Ozzie because I'm a dramatist. So anyway, it was like going to the moon for us. Rocky and me were looking at all this furniture and all this stuff. My grandfather, his hobby, was to grow tulips.
And he had all these framed blue and red, and yellow, I think, was the third color, ribbons for competitions. he went. We had no idea. So anyway, there was a sun porch off their bedroom. Daddy takes us out on the sun porch and there was a big armoire.
And Daddy opened it and it was full of bank ledgers. And my grandfather was a janitor at the First National Bank in Cumberland, Maryland. And he was stealing these bank ledgers. So Rocky and I compared notes. So we thought this meant we were rich.
Sure, sure.
He had squirreled away some fortune.
Unfortunately, my grandfather was stealing these bank ledgers and using them as scrapbooks. He was clipping newspapers and he glued the clippings in.
Just using it as paper.
Yeah, there were dozens. So Daddy starts taking these big bank ledgers, putting them on the ground where he was crouched, turning the pages furiously. Finally, after six or seven of these explorations, he found what he was looking for. And he said, you boys, look here. He lived to be 97 and a half, and Tuesday, dying day, he called me boy.
That was his term of affection for me. So we looked and it was an obituary. And the obituary was dated January 6th, 1888.. And it said, died this day in Cumberland, Maryland, Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman.
Like estimating cheese.
No, estimable.
Oh, estimable. Yeah, that's right.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's right.
A person who commands your esteem. Yes, yes, okay.
Then he pulled a sepia colored photograph out between the pages of the scrapbook. And he said, that's Jane Gates. That's the oldest ancestor we've ever been able to trace. I never want you to forget her name and I never want you to forget her face. And she was a midwife.
And in the obituary, I think they use a euphemism that suggests that she did nursing. And my brother and I stared at this obituary, said this funny looking lady who had her midwifery outfit on. It was just head and shoulders, but she had this cap on and this white thing. And then daddy put the photograph back in the scrapbook, closed. it, gathered all the rest of them, put in the armoire.
We went downstairs, had the repast, the meal following the burial. And then we drove home to Piedmont. Now, because my father worked two jobs at the paper mill as a janitor, we were the quote unquote richest black people in this little town of 2,500 people, an Irish-Italian paper mill town with a handful of black people. So what that meant, because he had this second job, extra income.
And mom worked? No, mama never worked. Oh, that's-.
No, because that was the thing. He worked two jobs. So my mother could be a lady.
You should sue Wikipedia, it said she cleaned houses.
When she was a little girl, she did. And she was one of 12.. She cleaned houses. She cleaned one house and the people were so horrible to her, but it was a very nice house. And it turned out years later, it was owned by my father's best friend, who was this white man.
And when I was 25, I came back from England and I talked to my brother, and we bought that house for my mom.
Oh, wow. Get out, that feels good.
And the first night we were at dinner and we were all so happy and my brother's married, I was married and we had really nice wine. And right in the middle of dinner, my mother burst into tears. And she said, these people treated me so horribly. And one time they planted $5 in the sofa to see if she would steal it. She was 12 years old.
Skippy, she said, I don't know if I can live in this house. And we said, mama, it's not Thompson's house anymore. This is Pauline Gates' house. This is your house. Everything was fine.
So- Sorry, you were at the downstairs gathering.
Because we had a very nice house, I always had my own bedroom and I had my own bookcase and my own desk. Beautiful mahogany antique set. And on my desk, next to my bed, sat a red Webster's dictionary. Because in the eighth grade, I fell in love with etymology and I loved just reading a dictionary. And the last thing I did was look up the word estimable.
Okay, here we go. Ding, ding, ding. Because I didn't know what it was. And I thought, wow, that funny looking old lady who has my surname is estimable. Maybe I'm estimable too.
So the next day was July 3rd, 1960.. I'm still nine years old. I would be 10 in September that year. And we went to the colored 4th of July picnic. Those schools integrated in my county, incredibly.
In 1955, remember Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court decision is 54..
So you would have been four years old at that time when they integrated?
They integrated in 55..
Oh, okay. Right, I was born in 1955.. So you entered, it was already integrated.
In first grade, I went to the white school. So I went to 12 years of integrated school. In spite of the fact that the schools integrated, the social events were segregated. Because people still weren't crazy about miscegenation, interracial dating or sex. That was not happening.
And on the way back, I asked Daddy to stop at Red Bull's newsstand, which is like a convenience store today. He was of Irish descent. I remember I'm from an Irish-Italian paper mill town. So everybody, they were either Irish-Italian or some mixture or some variety of that.
They were all Catholic.
They were a lot of Catholics. I asked Daddy to buy me a composition book. And that night, in front of our 12-inch RCA Victor television, I interviewed my mother and father about what, only years later, I would learn is called your family tree or your genealogy. I wanted to know two things. I wanted to know how someone with my physical feature, my phenotype, could be descended from a grandfather who was so white he looked like a ghost with translucent skin.
And I wanted to know what in the world was my connection to this woman, who had been a slave until slavery was abolished in Maryland in 1864, but who had my name and who had five children, all fathered by the same man, and whose identity she took to the grave, a white man. The only thing she told those five children, including my great-grandfather, also Edward Gates, was that they had the same father and that he was white.
They never met him.
They didn't know his name.
Did you uncover this? You must have at this point.
To this day, there's only one Gates who knows the identity of this man.
Is his name Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.?
We are having a Gates family reunion. And you're gonna unveil- In May, in Cumberland, Jane Gates's house, which she bought in 1870, cash.
Wow.
Where did a person who was enslaved to 1864 get enough money to plunk down 1,200 in a white neighborhood for a house? That house, because of my cousin Johnny Gates, is on the National Historic Register. We are having a family reunion. And C.C. Moore, the most brilliant genetic genealogist in the history of science, will reveal the identity of Jane Gates's paramour.
Oh, my gosh. Okay, wow.
And obviously, it's assumed that that mysterious man is the one who bought that house for her.
Or gave her the cash.
Gave her the cash to buy the house.
That's what we presume, but we don't know.
Yeah, because $1,200 is significant.
But you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess it. Right, right, right. But who knows? All of my cousins have taken DNA tests. Let me tell you something interesting about that family.
There was Jane. Her eldest son was my great-grandfather. He married a woman also very like-complected. They had two boys and three girls. At the beginning of the 20th century, they sent those three girls to Howard University.
Really?
And they kept my grandfather to run our 200-acre farm in Patterson's Creek, West Virginia, which is very near Piedmont and very near Cumberland, Maryland. It's hard for people to understand, but the paper mill town I grew up in is halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington. It's a funny tri-state area, and it's on the Maryland-West Virginia border, and Pennsylvania is only a few miles away.
Right, so that's a scene of a million civil war.
Harper's Ferry, where John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal took place in 1859, is now a superhighway. It's about an hour and 15 minutes away. Gettysburg is fairly nearby.
So clearly there were family members. Well, maybe not, because they've been merged by your current family, but certainly family members, some were living in Maryland, some were living in West Virginia. One had slavery, one did not at some period, right?
Well, West Virginia was Virginia until June 20th, 1863.. But the reason that I descend from so many free people of color is that there was no need in those mountains for slavery. You're not having tobacco plantations like we had in Virginia, or cotton plantations like you had in Mississippi, and Alabama, and Georgia, which is what led to the Trail of Tears. The richest cotton-growing soil in the United States, and perhaps one of the richest cotton-growing soils in the world, happened to be occupied by five Native American nations, the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, which is why, in 1830, the President of the United States signed the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson,
to get that soil,
from the Creek, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole. So where I grew up, my ancestors, there were house servants, maybe, but no estates. So we were lucky in that way. And that led to people being freed early on. And Joe and Sarah Bruce, my fourth great-grandparents of my father's mother's line, were freed, as I mentioned, in 1823, by a man named Abraham Van Meter, and we have his will.
So he probably freed them. One, he liked them, he said that in his will, also because he didn't want to burn in hell. Right. Right, right, right. The will says, on the death of my wife, Elizabeth Van Meter, they will be free.
And he gave them 1,000 acres of land. And some of that land is still in our family, the Bruce branch. Wow.
You know what's horrible, though? My instinct is to say, that's nice.
Well, there's a lot of, like, contradictory emotions you have. Like, I was even inclined to say, like, yes, if there's not an enormous economic benefit to the practice, it was also expensive to keep people in that time. So you couldn't have done it if it wasn't yielding. And I'm like, well, that's kind of a dicey thing to bring into this.
Well, it's all horrible. But it's also factual. Because apologists for slavery, I know this is gonna sound outrageous, but some people, historians, made the argument that slave owners were being benevolent because they were losing money. And they were doing this to help these poor, benighted Africans graduate from the university of slavery. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I don't buy that for a second. But I read a great paper when I was an anthropology major, about someone breaking down, in modern day economic times, the cost of each of the things they were supplying, whether it was boots, and it was food, and this and that. And then making an analysis of minimum wage and confronting the fact that a lot of the modern systems are nearly, obviously. you have freedom. They're not comparable in that way.
But just the actual cost in many instances is cheaper to just pay this minimum wage, which is completely insignificant and you can't sustain your, you know, that was the angle of the paper.
Right. You studied anthropology?
Yeah, at UCLA. You guys were both summa. I'm just a measly magna.
I'm glad you brought that up.
Yeah, yeah.
It's two days in a row. I know.
I was class of 73.. And when I hit Yale in 69, anthropology was one of the sexiest of the majors. Sidney Mintz, who wrote a brilliant book on the role of sugar. You know, in America, you think about continent slavery, but the real demonic commodity was sugar.
That's everything that's happening in the Caribbean.
The Caribbean. Yeah. And Brazil. Yes, yes. Okay, here's a quiz.
Parley game for you.
Oh, great.
We now know.
I gotta remind you, I'm only magna. And he's dyslexic. This might be a summa question.
Okay. And he's dyslexic. Yeah, yeah. I don't want that out there. The confusion.
And I walk with a cane. So, you know, I see you.
I died last night, so. Three spades.
By the way, do you play spades?
Everybody plays spades. We are obsessed with it.
It's our religion. We probably play nine hours a week. Really? Oh, my gosh. I haven't played in a long time.
So when you just said that, I got a burst of excitement.
Okay, so we know, because of a huge database called the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, put together by a man I admire so much, David Eltis and David Richardson, who recently passed, and a lot of other historians. It turns out there were little pockets of historians trying to count the number of Africans who were enslaved shipped across the Atlantic. These guys figured out they could bring everybody together and collate all the data. And this is what they found. Any of your listeners can look up voyages.org or just type in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and you can get to the website that has the data that I'm about to share with you.
So we now know that there were 12.5 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic between the early 16th century and 1866, more or less. 15% die in the Middle Passage. That means about 10.7 million. get off the boats. How many of those 10.7 million came to?
what is now the United States? Just guess.
Mine's four million.
Four million, that's a good guess.
Mine's nine.
Nine million. Yeah. Okay, final guess?
Yeah, I'm gonna have to stick because it's so arbitrary. That's my hunch.
388,000.. What?
Of the 12.5 million?
Of the 12.7 million, only 388,000 were shipped directly from Africa to what is now the United States. And another 70,000 were shipped to the West Indies. and then came. 450,000, that's it.
So it was entirely a sugar workforce.
Five million went to Brazil.
Oh, my God.
Brazil today is the second largest black nation in the world, after Nigeria. Approximately 950,000 went to Cuba. 772,000 went to Saint-Domingue, which is now Haiti, because of the Haitian Revolution.
Almost two X got to Haiti.
A million went to Jamaica. So five million went to Brazil. A million went to Jamaica. Almost a million went to Cuba. 772,000 went to Haiti, and all because of five letter word called sugar.
And the average lifespan of an enslaved man on a sugar plantation was seven years.
Fuck. Oh Lord.
And they just replaced them, like we used to replace spark plug.
Can I now add an anthropological part of that whole story? That always fascinates me. When you look at the incredibly high rate of hypertension and related health issues among African-Americans. in exploring why that is, it was pointed out that most of the Africans were captured in East Africa. Shaking your head, no.
No, 99% came from West.
Okay, so many were marched across Africa to sail out of West Africa where they were shipped from. And many, many died on that walk from dehydration. So the people that made it to West Africa to get on a boat had already had an inordinately high salinity count naturally in their body. Then they get on a ship where this whole other wave dies of again, dehydration. And the only ones that actually made it alive to get to these islands or to here are people that had such an inordinately high salinity count genetically.
And that's the group we start with here.
It's called the salt thesis. Essentially, you're right. Africa is too big to have walked anybody from the East to the West.
Right, okay.
But they were from the interior.
That's better.
And so it is a thesis, which is a salient thesis, that if you could retain fluid under those circumstances, as you put it, Mr. Anthropologist, Mr. Magna, so very well.
Sounds derogatory in this group.
That you had a better chance to survive. That's the good news. The bad news is, if you retain fluid, you have high blood pressure. So that's what's called the salt thesis.
Yes.
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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Can I get into one other dicey observation I made? I'm reluctant to say it out loud, but it definitely struck me, which is I grew up in Detroit.
Detroit?
Yeah, I mean, let's be real. I grew up 20 miles outside Detroit, but I also did live in downtown Detroit before I ended up moving here. And when I went to Africa in 2012, and I was in Tanzania and I was in Kenya and I was in a few different places, my initial shock was, oh my God, these black folks are so much smaller than the black folks in Detroit. I mean, significantly. Like if I'm walking around Detroit, I'm maybe in the 65th percentile in height and muscularity and everything else.
And I go to Africa and nearly everyone I meet, I'm bigger than. And for me, I was like, oh my God, this is so interesting.
But there's a great variety. You know, the Tootsies. Yes. They're very famous for being tall.
Yes, and the Hutu or Graseel, which is why the white people said that they should run things.
But your point is that nutrition, the amount of milk determines your stature. But also genetics as well.
Who survived? Who was robust enough to get here? Who was bred to be a laborer? There's just so many factors that lead to how this has been-. Yes, once they were here.
I couldn't not notice it. You've been several times and you did that great show.
When I was an undergraduate, Yale had a program called Five Year BA. 12 people were chosen. It was very competitive. And you went to what we used to call the third world, the developing world. And you had to work, hence Five Year BA.
And I really wanted to go to Africa. When I was a kid, I read an article in the Reader's Digest about an African kid who essentially walked across the equator and was saved by these missionaries. And I think it ended up in Washington State. And the idea of crossing the equator became an obsession with me. And I was pre-med.
I was raised to be a doctor. My brother's an oral surgeon. For my mother, God bless her soul, in heaven there's a father, son, the Holy Ghost, and a medical doctor.
Birthday stethoscope, Christmas dissecting kit. All smart little colored boys and colored girls are going to be doctors. Doctor was the top of the heap. Then lawyers.
Same with Indian families. Any immigrant family also has that exact same.
Hierarchy.
You'd go to someone's house and they'd say, Skippy and Rocky, I understand you're doing well in school. What are you going to be? And my mother would say, they are going to be doctors. Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
The Gateses are Episcopalians. And the Anglican communion is divided up between what we might call first world and third world diocese. And the diocese of West Virginia, sister diocese, was the diocese of Central Tanganyika, now Central Tanzania. So I was able to get a job at a mission hospital in the middle of Tanzania with the Gogo people. In those days, they didn't have frequent flyer miles.
They had air miles. So if you're JFK and I'm Dar es Salaam airport, there were exactly 11,000 air miles between the two. So I got on a plane with a backpack, pair of sandals, jeans, three books, plus Arthur Frommer's Europe on $5 a day. Oh, lovely.
You got a Frommer's guide.
And I flew from New York to London, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Rome, to Athens, to Tel Aviv, to Addis Ababa, to Nairobi, and to Dar es Salaam over, I don't know, six week period. And then slept from Dar es Salaam into the interior. The worst trip of my life was on a bus. It took 18 hours to go from Dar to Dodoma, the official capital.
Nicest roads imaginable.
Oh my God, I bounced off the ceiling. I mean, literally. And people got home with goats and chickens and stuff. And I did my best not to burst into tears. And think, this is the biggest mistake I ever made in my whole life.
You know, I am exploring my roots. I didn't think this was what my roots were gonna look like. And I worked in that mission hospital. I learned a lot about myself. I was living with European missionaries.
There were maybe half a dozen. They were mostly Australian nurses and an Australian doctor. And I was a female doctor for a while. She eventually left. We had a 120 bed hospital for 50,000 people in that district.
I worked in the theater, as we say in England. I worked in the operating room, holding a mask for people under anesthesia. That's what I did every day. And I saw things that I never would ever see. in medical school in the United States.
A woman came in, said she'd been pregnant for two years. The doctor was the jack of all trades. He did everything. He removed a basketball tumor out of this lady's stomach. I learned a lot about human beings.
I learned a lot about myself. I learned how African I was and wasn't, and how American I was and wasn't.
Yeah, can I ask what your fantasy was before arriving and what was the dissonance, and what did you conclude?
Oh, that's a great question. I don't think anybody's ever asked me that. First of all, there were so many myths about what our people in Africa were like. I'm using scare quotes.
You've got quotes going, yeah.
What our people were composed of, what different African civilizations consisted of. And I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to get to know one specific African culture, the Gogo people. The language is marvelous. A singer one was an Ngogo, plural is Wagogo.
They lived in Ugogo and they spoke Kigogo. Oh, that's wonderful. And I learned a little Swahili. I was tutored by a fellow student from Tanzania who was at Yale. But my vocabulary was inordinately populated by two kinds of words.
A word like wehele, which means breathe deeply. Right, right. And because I was living with missionaries, I had to go to chapel every morning. So let's see, you have a couple of trucks out there, right? So you can pick the kind of truck that's your fantasy truck, and it will be my gift if you answer the following question.
What does wehele mean? No, wehele means breathing.
Okay, I was gonna say, is this a trick because-.
No, what does umtakatifu mean? It's a religious term.
I was just gonna say you're in chapel, so that's a good context, right?
Oh God, Dax, a lot's riding on this.
You go first.
I don't want any trucks. That's your fantasy truck. Okay, umtakatifu.
I'm gonna say in his name.
That's close. But not close enough.
Not close enough for a truck.
Holy, holy, holy. Oh. Lord God, almighty. It means holy. Holy.
So I have all kinds of words in my vocabulary related to the hospital and to church. Right.
Breathe deeply and holy. But I guess my question is you're a young man. We're all searching for our identity. at that point. The boat ride on the Queen Elizabeth II to go to England.
I know that moment. I can only imagine what the narrative self was saying. I'm going to England. I'm gonna study.
Oh, my God, I was so happy.
I can only imagine. So this is another one of those moments, like I'm gonna go to Africa. I'm from there. I'm gonna feel, when I get there, did you have expectations that you would have some kind of sense of.
Connection.
A connection and a clarification and the hole we all carry being filled.
Those were the questions on the table. Would I feel connection? I was completely open. How African is an African American? A 19 year old, I turned 20 in the village.
I was never into romanticizing Africa. I didn't throw away all my Western clothes. I have a closet full of dashiki. I had one dashiki, which was cool.
They weren't the holders of magic. They were gonna hand you.
I had an Afro. I'm very proud of that Afro. You could Google, Skip Gates and Afro and you could see it online.
Oh, I shall. After I watch the time machine cartoon, straight over to the Afro.
The way back machine. Way back machine. I'm getting closer to remembering. I realized that Africa was a long time ago in the history of our people. That we were an African people who lived in the new world.
And even the Africans called me and any other African American an Mzungu, which basically means white man. Oh, wow. You are ours, you are our brother, but you are Western. The most important thing I realized is how American we are.
To me, culture defines everything. I've always been kind of hesitant at a notion that our identity or the spirit or anything would be just a genetic thing.
Yeah, that it would be biological. It's ridiculous. It's kind of crazy.
Culture's the operating software.
I have two children. If, at birth, they had been spirited away to say China and raised in China. And if the Chinese, this is crucial to what I'm about to say. If the Chinese people treated them like they were Chinese, they'd be Chinese. Right, 100%.
What are they gonna do? You know, like basketball and fried chicken. You know what I'm talking about? Those things are not biological. That's a crazy, ridiculous thing.
So I loved it. I loved the people. They loved me. I loved being there. I went from pre-med, it took me a few years.
Cambridge was the crucial arena when I abandoned that fantasy of being a doctor and discovered, thanks to two Africans, Wally Shoyinka, who got the Nobel Prize 13 years later, after we met, the first African to get the Nobel Prize in literature. And my best friend Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the Ethicist column in the Sunday Times magazine. Oh, cool. The great philosopher. Both the godfathers of my two girls.
And you met them both. I met them in Cambridge.
You were fucking bouncing around. There's a lot in the stew. And you've already been to Africa. Now you're in England.
Was one more element. Remember the fantasy of hitchhiking across the equator?
Oh, yes.
So, after I lived in the village, the people didn't have running water and didn't have electricity. We had a generator because I was living with the missionaries. Many of the most important battles in World War I were fought in Africa. This was a German outpost, this village. Oh, really?
And I lived in the German jail. And it was like a German fort. And there was a cemetery of German soldiers who had died. The village is called Kilimatindi. And you could see it in the very first documentary that I made.
It was for the BBC series called The Great Rail Journey.
You went with your wife, your then wife and your two daughters.
And it ends with me going back to the village 25 years later. Between August and December, I lived in that village. And it was tough. I was seeing things. I didn't like, the politics of the missionaries vis-a-vis the Africans.
And I got in arguments with them. Let me put it kindly. I mean, these people were sacrificing so much to help the African people. But they also had condescending attitudes about us.
They came with a price.
We got in big fights about that. And finally, I left. And I went to Dar es Salaam. There was a great university and I heard the great historian Walter Rodney lecture about the history of slavery and the relationship to economics and all kinds of interesting things. I was there about a month.
And I wanted to go to Zanzibar. So I'd go to Zanzibar. You would go down to the dock at night and there were fishing boats that would sail overnight to Zanzibar from Dar. And you'd give them, you know, a dollar. And there was this white guy there named Lawrence Biddle Weeks.
Hold on a second.
Yeah, your name recalls incredible.
It's kind of unparalleled.
Yeah, we always comment on that with people.
We've noticed that older people do this. My mother does this. She remembers all of her school teachers' names. We're working on a theory on why this is. Maybe too much stimuli and TV and something else.
We don't have it.
I feel like it's unique to your generation.
Well, but it's genetic in my family. And my father and brother could tell you the hand you played in Bid Whiz 20 years ago. Okay, okay, okay. I mean, they had this photographic memory. I have a good memory.
They had a perfect memory. My brother could tell you all the bones in the body, all the nerves, that kind of stuff. A sign of genius. But anyway.
Yeah, you got a white cat on a boat.
Larry Weeks. And halfway over to Zanzibar, and you have to imagine what the stars look like. with no pollution. You could see the Southern Cross, you know, a different set of constellations, because you're south of the equator. Moves you to tears.
He told me that his fantasy had been like Cecil Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes wanted to build railroads from Cape to Cairo. So Larry's was to hitchhike from South Africa all the way to Egypt. I told him mine, because that Reader's Digest article was to hitchhike across the equator. We flipped a coin.
I won. And about two weeks later, we went from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa, Kenya, Mombasa to Nairobi, Nairobi to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, right after Idi Amin's coup. From Kampala down to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, from Kigali to Goma, on Lake Kivu in the Congo. And then six days through Bush in Eastern Congo to Kisangani. And we got on the big river boat and took six days and sailed down the Kinshasa, which is about 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
So you won the coin toss. Yeah.
And I got my fantasy. You did. We did.
And that matched your fantasy. That was. You should have abandoned medicine to be a novelist at this point. This is like your Hemingway out there.
But in my 20th year, I had climbed the Parthenon, I'd been to the Coliseum, I'd been to the Holy Land, and I had seen six African countries. Wow.
Yeah.
And when I came back to Yale, nobody could tell me shit about it. Anything.
Yeah.
No. Sitting around in bull sessions, people in dashikis and Afro smoking a joint telling me, our people in Africa. And I go, you don't know what you're talking about. And that freed me. I was proud of my African heritage.
And I became a professor of African and African-American studies because of the intervention in Cambridge of Shoyinka and Anthony Appiah. But I knew where my Africanity, as it were, started and stopped. I knew the culture was not biological. I knew that it was not essentialized. I knew that our people had left Africa a long time ago and there were big differences.
And when I sailed back to the United States from England and saw the Statue of Liberty, I burst into tears. I was glad to be home and I knew that I was American and I was proud of it. But I was an African-American. Yeah. I wasn't an American like you're an American.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wasn't an American like you, of an immigrant family. My people had been here forever.
Is it fair to say you're walking with a limp because you're an African-American?
Yeah, I had a normal hip condition, a slipped epithecis that was misdiagnosed by a racist white doctor who said that it was entirely psychosomatic. Oh my God.
Yeah, because black folks lie about their pain level.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
If you break your hip, you have what's called referred pain. So I had this enormous pain in my knee, but my leg was rotated out 180 degrees. So any elementary medical school student would have known that my hip was broken.
Right.
Except this idiot. And so he wrapped my leg with a walking cast. And while he was doing it, he said, well, I understand, you're a good student. Everybody knew everybody in this county. And I said, yes, sir, I want to be a doctor.
And he said, well, who was the first scientist to process oxygen? And I said, I think it was Joseph Priestley. Somebody can fact correct me on that. Yeah. He asked me three or four questions and I answered them.
The cast dried a few hours later and they stood me up to have me walk. With my hip, the ball sat completely separate.
Oh, my God.
And I fell. And my mother was there, and my mother said, that's it, we're taking him out of this hospital.
Yeah.
But that was the guy. And he told my parents that it was psychosomatic, that I had studied too hard, that all those answers I gave were a sign that basically the Negro mind had cracked under the pressure. I swear to God. And I don't even like to talk about it, because it's so. That's so.
And so, yes, you're returning to America. There is the Statue of Liberty. You are right to cry. And also there's a reality that you're also entering this country with a limp because of the reality of being black in America.
Yeah. But the differential between the lengths of my leg got worse over time. So I didn't walk with a cane then, but I walk with a cane now, and there's about an inch and a half difference.
How old were you when that happened?
I was 14 years old.
Playing touch football. No. Yeah, I was on a warpath about football, so I just want to fuel it a little bit.
Three operations and then they finally put in a cup arthroplasty and now I've had two hip replacements. And I have my shoes made by a great orthopedic shoemaker, if anybody wants to know, the T.O. Day Company, D.E.Y. Shout out. They make the best orthopedic shoes in the whole world.
Okay, we got to get into the shows.
This is so fun, man.
It is so fun and you're such an incredible storyteller. But the boat ride, I'm a romantic. The boat ride at that age to England.
I had just graduated from Yale the day before.
You're from a rural area of West Virginia. Yeah. The narrative self has got to be high five in itself.
Well, the Gateses have a long history of college education. So I mentioned my three great aunts were educated at Howard. My father's first cousin, the son of one of those three, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1949, George Lee. The Ivy League was always his presence. And he married a black woman.
His wife got a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard in 1955..
Oh, my gosh.
As a black woman? Yeah. Wow. Her name was Dorothy Hicks Lee. And we created a prize in her honor.
that's given at Harvard every year. Oh, amazing. She's the first black person to get a PhD in comparative literature and the second woman. So anyway, the Gateses valued education. So one of us is going to Harvard.
So I applied to Yale and I got in. And I loved it from the second I got there. I was so glad. The last thing I told my father and my mother was, I said, look, all these kids up, there are geniuses. I thought it was like Albert and Alberta Einstein.
1969, when I was going up, I was transferring. I did my first year at a community college five miles away, and then I transferred. And when I wrote to Yale, I said, I'd be happy to repeat my freshman year. My brother and I never got the memo that black people didn't test well on standardized exams. We were too far away from the city.
So we always tested well. So I tested well, I'd gotten straight A's at Tillman State College. And they let me in the sophomore year. When I got there, I looked at this building, neo-Gothic building. that was a cathedral.
I walked in, it was the library. And I stood there and there's this great stained glass window where you used to go to check out books. And I thought, this is never Neverland, man. I have been transported into- Hogwarts. Yeah.
And that was the year they let in women for the first time. Well, good for you. The class of 73, yeah. Yeah, thank God.
You've time shipped pretty perfectly. Schools were integrated. No, they loved women in Yale.
And it was the largest class of black kids. We were the first affirmative action generation. When the Ivy League schools lifted their strict racist quote on the number of black kids who could matriculate. And I was one of 96, either in the freshman class or who transferred. Because some of the women were transferring from the Seventh Sisters.
Women's College. Or Hunter. Sheila Jackson Lee, very good friend, Congresswoman from Houston. She transferred from Hunter. If I get a C, average, I'd said to my dad, that's like getting an A from West Virginia University.
Right. And he looked at me and he said, boy, you think I'm stupid. Yeah.
I was trying to set my expectations low.
He said, just go up there, do as well as you can do. And if they don't treat you right, just remember, you can always come on home. And when he told me that, I cried. Yeah. And that did more to give me self-confidence.
The message was, my love for you is unconditional. Yeah. You can come back with your tail between your legs. You're my son.
But then he added, but I know, if you do the best you can do, you're gonna get straight A's.
Exactly.
We didn't have A's and B's. We had honors, high pass, pass, and fail. The first semester, if I'm recalling correctly, I got one honors and three high passes, and I was ecstatic. But the second semester, baby, I got four honors and one high pass. And the rest of my time, I got straight A's.
And you went in Andrew Mellon?
Paul Mellon.
Paul Mellon.
I was junior year, Phi Beta Kappa, and I graduated just like you. Summa. Summa.
Wow. Summa wouldn't wanna be ya.
That's why you're magna. Yeah.
We had more fun, that's why.
In that bag of fantasies that I was carrying around invisibly, one was to be a Rhodes Scholar. I wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, and I wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge. And I applied for all these fellowships. Look, I was junior, Phi Beta, I was black, I was from West Virginia. I was gonna get one of these things, right?
But I was a finalist, and I didn't get any. I was a finalist for Rhodes, I was a finalist for Marshall, and I was blowing the interviews somehow. And my girlfriend at the time said, you're probably just being an asshole, trying to pretend to be somebody, you're not. Why don't you just go in and be yourself? I was down to the seventh possibility to fulfill this fantasy that I'd had since eighth grade, and it was the Mellon Fellowship.
Before I walked in, I was sitting in the ante room, and this kid came out, and his face was radiant. And he knew that he had been selected. He said, oh, that was the best interview I ever did, and I'm gonna go to Cambridge, and I'm gonna, we say, read, we don't study or major in. He said, I told him I was gonna read English with Professor so-and-so, and I thought, man, I'm dead, because I don't even know who he's talking about. So, door opened, they said, Mr.
Gates, and they said, why would you like to go to Cambridge? The Mellons, they're two from Yale, to Clare College, Cambridge, and two from Clare, who come to Yale. There were 12 colleges at Yale, which Yale's a name for dorms, and the head of the college until recently was called the master. And one of the masters was a woman, I'll make it even more ironic, Kitty Lussman, I'll never forget her, a brilliant child-type college.
Yeah, you won't forget her, because you haven't forgotten a single name you've heard over the last 73 years.
And I said, I have no idea with whom I wanna study or even what. And they looked at me like I was dead. And they said, well, why do you wanna go? Why do you want this fellowship? I said, at the end of my sophomore year, I was lucky enough to be chosen for the five-year BA program.
And I lived in Africa, and on the way to Africa, I traveled over the European continent, went to the Middle East, and then, on the way back, I went to Paris and London. And so I had a year when I had a chance to look at myself as a black person, living in a continent, the people of which were majority black. And I was able to begin to understand how much of social dilemmas that I faced, how much of my personality and my characteristics were related to African people and African culture. And I said, in other words, I had a chance to think about how much is racial in terms of social dilemmas, and how much is related to other factors like class, like economics.
Oh, Cass, that great book.
Isabelle's book. And I said, I would like to have the same opportunity in reverse. I would like to be able to be a black American, studying race, living in Europe, to see how much of my personality is American, how is race socially constructed in England.
Oh, so it looked like over there. Versus here. That's right.
What is transcendent about blackness and what is local about blackness? What is the black experience in England and how does the black experience in England compare to the black experience in America? That was it, baby. Slam dunk. Yeah, I mean, I just got chills, so that didn't work.
That killed it. Because I was telling the truth. That was why I wanted to live there. I didn't know that my fate was sitting over there at the University of Cambridge, that my whole career was waiting for me through the intervention of two African geniuses, one who had spent 27 months in prison during the Nigerian Civil War, Wole Soyinka. When he got out, he would publish his prison memoirs that the Nigerian government wanted to kill him all over again.
He took political exile, got a fellowship to teach at Cambridge. The English department was so backwards that they wouldn't give him an appointment because they said African literature wasn't really literature, so he was in the social anthropology department.
Oh, man.
Oh, sure, well, we'll take anyone. Come on in.
Amazing. And he only had one student, and that was me. No. And he gave a series of lectures which were collected under the title Myth Literature in the African Worldview, and in the preface, he talks about the experience of his one student in the English department, not giving him a teaching appointment and getting a teaching appointment in social anthropology. And then Anthony Appiah was a second-year student, a genius like Soyinka, and he had moved from wanting to be a doctor, he was pre-med first year, and switched to philosophy, and the two of them, after we had met for a month, Anthony's father's, a prominent Ghanaian politician who was best friends with Kwame Nkrumah, and Nkrumah, turned against him, put him in jail because he accused Nkrumah of corruption, but he's like the John Adams of Ghana.
And the two of them took me out to an Indian meal, and my mouth was on fire because Africans like this hot food.
Soyinka's, an oenophile, connoisseur of wine, and my generation in Yale didn't drink wine. We used cheap wine like Boone's Farm, apple wine in Mad Dog 2020, in hookahs, for the consumption of more vaporous kinds of pleasure. So my mouth is on fire, I'm getting drunk from drinking all this wine. They look at me and they said, we have brought you here for a reason. We are from your future, and you are not gonna be a medical doctor.
You are gonna be a professor of African and African-American studies. I was thunderstruck, and I burst into tears because I realized that it's what I really wanted to do.
And you got permission to.
I got permission to. I was black, but not a socially constructed blackness in America. I was like an anthropologist. I could be completely removed from the experience of West Indians, who had come up primarily on the wind rush in 1948, and their descendants living in England. And I was able to begin to understand, like I did in Africa, how much of what I thought was social situations entirely constructed by racism, how much was really constructed by class.
What social problem were common to Tanzania, England, and the United States? Well, they can't all be about the experience of slavery and its aftermath.
Yeah, and that's what Isabel did. She did the Dalit in India, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the African-Americans here. Absolutely. They don't share a race in common, so what else do they share in common?
Right, so you control the variables, so I can experiment. I was blessed because of that experience that year away between my sophomore and junior year and the fellowship to go to Cambridge to study the curious interaction between race and class, upfront and personal, in my own life. every day. I thought, before I went to Africa, that race was everything, which is a famous saying from a racist scientist in the 19th century. But it's not.
Class is just as important.
Well, you look at the similarities. I, as a white trash kid from my area, why do I like rap? Why do I like country? This is disenfranchised stories.
Yes, that's right.
It's the same shit.
I graduated at Piedmont High School with 36 kids, and most of them were white. I know that, as it were, the cultures of poverty are colorblind. Right. That obesity, out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
Educational attainment, health attainment, every metric we would use to evaluate, you could graph them, we wouldn't know who was who.
You got it.
Which is not to say there's not another layer, which is more dangerous, I acknowledge, but you could make a graph where no one could tell.
The bottom line is economics. You know, as the brothers say, it's all about the Benjamins. Yeah, true. Everything else is part of the super show. Yeah.
I definitely believe that.
And it's infuriating to watch how the two classes have been pitted against each other to prevent us from getting together to go, wait, who's the real enemy here?
Well, the two races have been.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's been intentional to make these poor white folks in the black folks.
In two weeks, I'll start second semester at Harvard and I'm teaching a brand new seminar on W.E.B. Du Bois, the greatest black intellectual of all time. And he published an essay called The Wages of Whiteness, and I'll be teaching it. And it's about how people with identical class interests, because of the structures of racism in America, would rather identify vertically in the silo than laterally to their class counterparts.
Their brothers.
Their brothers and sisters that we should be fighting together to address problems that are fundamentally economic. And then you have demagogues who then manipulate these received structures of racism to convince poor white people that their interests are based on the purity of whiteness, the sanctity of whiteness. Why they suffer. All these people of color coming in, but it's not, they're being exploited by the system economically.
And used to pacify. Well, at least you're not those people. So if those people are really below you, even though they're not, that is something we can give you to prevent you from poking holes in the system. you should be so delighted you're a part of.
And so that most attempts historically to organize workers economically fell apart as soon as they played the race card. They go, at least. you're not an animal. No matter how poor you are, you are a white man.
That's the great Chris Rock joke. There's a white janitor in here that's watching me and saying, I don't think I'd trade places with him. I'll just stick with this white thing.
And I learned that implicitly every day in the year, in Tanzania, in Europe, the year off and then in England. And that was a great thing. Didn't make me a Marxist. I'm very much involved in figuring out how to make capitalism more humane. And I've been very blessed in my career.
My wife is a Cuban citizen and my stepchildren are now Americans. I met her in 2009 when I was filming one of my favorite black history series for PBS called Black and Latin America. And she was a prominent historian. And I met her at 10 o'clock in the morning, interviewed, took her to lunch, took her to dinner. I've been in love ever since.
But for her, raised in a communist country, class was everything. And what was suppressed was race.
That's so interesting.
And for us, what was suppressed was class. You know, America, what are you talking about? We don't have classes.
Right, we're a meritocracy.
Yeah, and it's not true. But you can also see, we happen to own a condo in Miami and you can see the fervor of Cuban immigrants and how well they do. I'm generalizing, not everybody. But when there are family gatherings and people talk about the promise of America, you realize that that is what made our country great. Martin Luther King gave a commencement address at Stanford that I like to quote.
And he said, it's commonly said that we're a nation of immigrants of America, but we're also a nation of exiles. And that's beautiful. We are a nation of political exiles, religious exiles, and economic exiles. And people came here and they go, this is wide open. I often ask people that I'm interviewing for Finding Your Roots, do you think that you could have had this career if your ancestors had stayed in Ukraine or in England?
No way. Everything became possible once they came here. And we have to remember that. I think the popularity of Finding Your Roots has to do with two things. One, reminding people that we are a nation of immigrant slash exiles.
And two, biologically, that at the level of the genome, we're 99.99% the same. And three, no, there is no such thing as racial purity.
Yes.
That we're all mixed up.
And 50,000 years ago, we were all Africans. Yeah, I know.
In anthro, we reject race as a concept. You could genetically have more in common, if you're Irish, with somebody in Central Africa than someone in Southern Africa would have, you know. Right.
Demagogues, evil people, have used the tiny little phenotypical differences.
The least significant, least complex gene order.
To reify them, to say that those signify fundamental differences of essence. Characteristics meaning something different than we mean. Your level of intelligence. Yes. Ultimately, your value.
Yes. So then, on all of those diagrams of the great chain of being, there's God at the top, looking like Carlton Heston. There are the angels right under God. And then there are the four or five quote unquote races of man. And at the bottom of the races of man was an African with a simian look just under the African.
The next rung of the great chain of being was an ape.
Last stop.
Ain't that cold? Oh, fuck.
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
Okay, we must, because you've come here, obviously, to promote something. This is great. And it's so awesome.
I didn't have to do shit. We're done. I'm going to Jacques-Marie Mage to buy a new pair of glasses.
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