Who's Your (Irish) Daddy? Henry Louis Gates Jr. Reflects On An Unknown Irish Ancestor

Who's Your (Irish) Daddy? Henry Louis Gates Jr. Reflects On An Unknown Irish Ancestor

In one of my favorite Malcolm X speeches, the brilliant rhetorician asks, "What's your name? It isn't Smith or Jones or Bunche [as in Ralph] or Powell [as in Adam Clayton; Malcolm is playing the dozens here!]. They don't have those kinds of names where we come from! What's your name?" It might have shocked Malcolm to learn the complexity of the answer to that question, an answer buried deep in our collective DNA.

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