When Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates isn’t busy terrorizing the city of Cambridge with his bad, 5’ 7” elderly self, he is sometimes creating amazing PBS specials about stuff we should all know about but don’t. In the past, Gates has used PBS specials to shine a healing light onto our hidden African-American heritage, and now he is at it again, this time peering straight into the dark closets where American families keep (and eventually forget) their private skeletons and deepest secrets.

I was thrilled by the first episodes of “Faces of America.” I love a good ghost story, and Americans—maybe more than any other people on the planet—are a haunted people. So many of us have lost track of our roots completely. We don’t know where we come from, and when you don’t know where you come from, you can’t know who you really are. That’s when the ghosts start to show up, begging for their stories to be told so they can be written into the official record, vindicated, and released.

My own family is a good example of this uniquely American dynamic. For most of my 56 years I assumed my father’s family came from Ireland and that the name ‘Grundy’ was of Irish origin. I also remember my father’s mother getting angry at my grandfather and telling him that he wasn’t a real Irishman at all, but rather the descendent of “…a Welsh horsethief who fled to Ireland and was hanged anyway.”

At that point, my grandfather always turned his hearing aid off. (He did that a lot when my grandmother got like this.) It was a funny story we all enjoyed telling for years after they both died. Imagine my astonishment when my brother’s wife took up geneaology late in her own life, and traced our family tree back to Ireland and discovered that the Irish Grundy who spawned the rest of (back at the beginning of the 19th centur) was…um, descended from a Welsh horsethief who fled to Ireland to escape hanging.

He was hanged anyway.

We weren’t Irish at all, or we were, but not in the way we had always assumed. Both sides of my family kept ancestral secrets: one side somewhat unintentionally (my father’s side) and the other side very intentionally (my mother’s side).

The more I talk to other Americans, the more I find this to be the rule rather than the exception. Most of our ancestors came here from other countries for compelling reasons. They weren’t boring and their stories were frequently dramatic. Something pushed these people to make a treacherous journey to a strange land, often under arduous conditions. Yet often the true story of that journey and the reasons for it gets lost over time.

“Faces of America” captures the facial expressions of 12 famous Americans as Gates reveals that they are not quite who they think they are. Their real stories are amazing; even more dramatic than the default stories  stored in their heads, passed down in more and more fractured form from one generation to the next.

It’s fascinating stuff that goes far beyond genealogy 101. For example, we just elected “the first black President of the United States,” a man whose mother was white and who was raised by working class  grandparents of British and German ancestry. If we can so easily make Barack Obama black and in so doing erase a much more complex English, Scottish, Cherokee, Welsh, German, and French ethnic heritage, what else have we erased in our own families and long since forgotten? What have we edited out of our historical record that, when lost, drastically changes our understanding of who we really are?

Scholars of African American history know that the answer to that question is: “Lots.”

(Ask the descendents of Sally Hemings if you don’t believe me.)

Our American memory is dysfunctionally selective. By structuring “Faces of America” around Americans of all racial, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds and focusing on the connections they share, rather than the differences that distinguish one from the other, Gates has gracefully opened a topic that can be incendiary and painful in less expert hands.

If we were to truly understand our individual histories and how we each came to be on this soil today, we would see that we are all much more connected than we pretend to be, and that our individual and collective stories are much richer and more inspiring than the constrictive mythologies we perpetuate about ourselves. Barack Obama, far from being the exotic hothouse hybrid his critics suggest, is actually much more American and ‘normal’ (at least in his ancestry and his story) than apple pie, hot dogs, and the stars and stripes combined.

I think Henry Louis Gates knows that.

If you watch the show, you’ll know it too.

For thoughts on how personal heritage impacts political views and values, check out Eye On Life Senior Editor Roberta Kyle’s essay My Grandmoter the Educated Woman.

http://eyeonlife.squarespace.com/hamburgers-and-politics/my-grandmother-the-educated-woman.html