Poem Analysis: Finding Your Roots

Finding Your Roots Most families aren’t aware of where they truly come from. Ancestry can take a person way back into history, relating them to someone they can’t even imagine to have been connected with. History can unravel not only relationships, but also genetic dispositions, and even historical findings. Finding your roots is a series of that involves people who are given the history of their families, and is revealed to the stories of their ancestry, from years and years ago. In this specific episode, Henry Louis Gates Jr. unearths the history of three people in the episode, hip-hop artists Nast, award-winning actress Angela Bassett and presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett. He takes them back in time over 200 years and explains the way their families were treated back when they were slaves, and their lives during that time. Each person, Nas, Angela Bassett and Valerie Jarrett, were not only shocked to find out whom their ancestors were, but also to learn how their ancestors lived on a day-to-day basis, and what type of treatment and how they endured their treatment …show more content…
Henry Louis Gates Jr. met with presidential advisor Valarie Jarrett, and began to explain to her about her family history. He began to speak about how one of her family members not only were enslaved, but had labeled their owner as their father. Miss Valarie Jarrett was completely mind blown, how could her enslaved relative, be under the ownership of his own father. Mr. Gates Jr. asked Miss. Jarrett: “Why do you think this man, who gave his son the freedom of a freed slave, but never once freed him?” To which Jarrett replied, “It must have just been safer that way” (Finding Your Roots). Miss. Jarrett realized that her ancestor was a slave, but if he was not one, she may have not even been alive. It was very appalling to see how the treatment or lack there of for slaves is what brought these people on the show