'Finding Your Roots' amid the hard questions of history, identity

There’s a lot of work that goes into each and every episode of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Now in its fourth season on PBS, the hit series investigating the genealogy of notable figures will search far and wide to get to the bottom of a given case study, according to Gates, the series' host, writer and executive producer.

Gates — an Emmy-winning filmmaker as well as the Alphonse Fletcher University professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University — told the Asbury Park Press’ “Fan Theory” podcast that the “command central” for Finding Your Roots rests with chief genealogist Johni Cerny out in Provo, Utah. 

“All the research that can be done using digital sources, she and her team do (that),” Gates said. “But there are a lot of records that haven’t been digitized around the world, and in those cases we have to send people to the actual countries, to look in churches or courthouses or whatever archives might exist.”

Take the case of singer/songwriter Carly Simon, for example. Gates and his team worked for more than a year to uncover Simon’s family history for an episode that aired in October, even enlisting Cuban historians to visit the island’s province of Holguin and examine records in churches, eventually learning that Simon was descended from freed slaves.

The fourth season of Finding Your Roots airs 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Dec. 19 on PBS. The Nov. 14 episode will feature actress Lupita Nyong’o, basketball star Carmelo Anthony and political strategist and commentator Ana Navarro.

The series was born from Gates’ 2006 PBS documentary miniseries African American Lives.

“I didn’t known when I got the idea (for the series) which component, the genealogical component or the genetic component, would be more emotionally engaging to people," Gates said. "I actually thought in the very beginning it would be finding out where in Africa where your ancestors were from because I only did black people in the first two specials, which were called African American Lives.

"But it turns out that finding out the name of your heretofore anonymous ancestors who were enslaved, that was the part that moved African Americans. And the same is true for white people, Asian people, Indians, Muslims, Hindu people, everybody who’s in the series. Finding out the name of your actual biological antecedents, the people on your mother’s side of your family tree, your father’s side of your family tree, and then hearing stories about them, whether they were angels or shysters, is the part of the series that turns people on.”

But a number of Season Four stories, such as Simon's family saga or the revelation that Larry David's ancestors owned slaves, enforce the fact that after all of these years it remains difficult to discuss issues relating to race in American society.

Gates, for his part, said he believes it's still hard to talk about race due to the huge social and economic discrepancies that remain in modern society, and he discussed the currently divisive political climate.

“Under eight years of Barack Obama, we felt that things were improving in some areas, in some areas quite dramatically," Gates said. "But over the last year, I think that many of us are in shock. And when we see the rise of the alt-right, when we see what happened in Charlottesville with white supremacists, I sat there dumb-founded. I mean, I couldn’t even talk, I couldn’t understand what they were reciting.

“They (the white nationalist demonstrators) were saying, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ Where did that come from, Nazi Germany? What year is this? Did I step into a time machine? I think that we’re living in an era where people are afraid because of economic scarcity, and in times of fear and economic scarcity, people turn to racial stereotypes."

Gates then called back to something he tells Harvard students in the lecture course he teaches with Lawrence D. Bobo.

“Under the floorboards of Western culture there are two streams always running, at least two streams," Gates said. "One is antisemitism and one is anti-black racism. You could also say homophobia or Islamophobia, but as far as the history of the West, antisemitism and anti-black racism have been so prominent and so continuous. And now we see these discourses of enmity and hatred seemingly legitimized, and that’s quite frightening.”

But, Gates insisted that when he discovers difficult chapters in the family histories of his Finding Your Roots guests, his aim is not to shame.

“The main thing that I do or try to do is make people realize that you’re not responsible for your ancestors. Guilt is not inheritable," Gates said. "Whatever they did, it’s just an historical fact. You don’t have to feel guilty about that. You don’t have to apologize for that. You certainly can comment on it, but I’m not here to horrify you, right? All of these stories are fascinating.”

To hear Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s full conversation with the “Fan Theory” podcast, listen to the episode on Friday on iTunes, Soundcloud and Google Play and at app.com/fantheory. Follow Alex Biese on Twitter: @ABieseAPP