DNA Testing: In Our Blood
[snip]
And then there's Prof. Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr., head of Harvard University's African-American Studies department. Gates always knew he wasn't 100 percent African-American. According to family legend, Gates's only white ancestor was a slave owner named Samuel Brady, who had sex with Gates's great-great-grandmother Jane on his farm in Maryland in the 1800s. But recent DNA analyses turned Gates's world upside down. There was no trace of Brady on Gates's genome. Further testing revealed that Gates, in fact, carries as much Western European blood as he does African—and that one of his white ancestors was probably an Irish servant who met Gates's sixth or seventh great-grandfather sometime before 1700. "I'm thinking I'm a Brady and maybe I'm from Nigeria, and here I am descended from some white woman," says Gates. "It's incredible."
[snip]
Too bad for him. The family legend of master-slave sex turned out to be false. Instead there's a "Mic" in the woodpile. Horrors! (my surname is Irish so I found this to be particularly funny)
Cornel West can't get along anywhere. Here's what Wiki says...
1993 saw the publication of Race Matters, a bestselling collection of essays, as well as his departure from Princeton to join the Afro-American studies program at Harvard, chaired by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who called West "the preeminent African-American intellectual of our generation"). In 1998, Harvard appointed him the first Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., University Professor.
West's popularity was not, however, universal. Critics, most notably The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, charged him with opportunism, crass showmanship and lack of scholarly seriousness. West remains a widely cited scholar in the popular press, in African-American studies and in studies of black theology, although his work as an academic philosopher has been almost completely ignored (with the exception of his early history of American pragmatism, The American Evasion of Philosophy).
In 2001, West became involved in a very public dispute with newly appointed Harvard president and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. (As one of the 17 faculty members with the distinguished rank of University Professor, West reported directly to the president on his research agendas and was permitted total freedom to teach across departmental lines and in other Harvard schools). Summers, in one of his meetings with West, allegedly accused West of devoting too much time and attention to political activities and traditionally non-academic pursuits, including West's spoken-word CD Sketches of My Culture, which he believed was at the expense of his teaching and academic responsibilities.
Soon after, West was hospitalized for prostate cancer. West complained that Summers failed to send him get-well wishes until weeks after his surgery, whereas newly installed Princeton president Shirley Tilghman had contacted him frequently before and after his treatment. In 2002, West left Harvard to return to Princeton. West later lashed out at Summers in public interviews, calling him "the Ariel Sharon of higher education" on NPR's The Tavis Smiley Show.
I guess I know what his point of view will be. "Claiming our Democracy" should be changed to "Claiming our Entitlement".