OF ‘FINDING YOUR ROOTS WITH HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.’

Having recently started the seventh season of “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” how do you assess what the program does?

There’s no greater gift than seeing the names and dates of your ancestors restored in your large family tree that we present as the gift to each of the guests. People break down and cry. They go home and have them framed.

I believe our ancestors are in a kind of purgatory waiting to be discovered, and when we unlock the vault where they have been kept, they tell the guest their story. And often, each guest has been playing out a legacy that they inherited invisibly and didn’t even know before.

What title do you put on the role you fill on “Finding Your Roots”?

My day job is, I am a professor ... so my goal, no matter the medium, is to teach. I have always thought that we could use “Finding Your Roots” to entice particularly inner-city brown and black kids into learning about STEM courses, so that you could make biology and genetics sexy.

Look, if any of us walked into a classroom and said, “Today’s lesson is Watson and Crick’s double helix,” (attendees) would say, “Get out of town!” But (imagine) if we walked in and said, “See this test tube? Spit in it, and in two weeks, I am going to tell you what percentage of your ancestors going back 500 years are European, sub-Saharan African and Asian. And not only that, we can subdivide those categories into 60 divisions. If you are of African-American descent, I can tell you each part of West Central Africa that you might be 20 percent of – what’s today Ghana – or 15 percent from eastern Nigeria.”