For Some White Celebrity Guests, ‘Finding Your Roots’ Means Learning You’re Black

PBS’ hit series “Finding Your Roots” is must-see television for its more than 4.5 million weekly viewers who tune in to learn more about their favorite stars’ family history.

Whether it’s Angela Davis learning that she’s a direct descendant of the founding fathers or Tracy Morgan finding out that he and Nas are third cousins, when celebrities hear the truth about their ancestry, there’s always a surprise – especially when a white guest finds out they have African ancestry.

Series host Henry Louis Gates Jr. sat down with our very own Editor-in-Chief, Tatsha Robertson, to talk about some of the biggest surprises he’s delivered to the white celebrities on the show.

Gates recalled a Season Four shocker when he shared the results of singer Carly Simon’s DNA test. Genealogists discovered that the singer is 10 percent African, which is the equivalent of having a great-grandmother with full African ancestry. It turns out that Simon’s grandmother pretended to be of Spanish and Moroccan heritage, when in reality, she was a Black woman from Cuba.

“We have never tested a white person as Black as you,” Gates told Simon at the time.

But as Gates told us, Simon’s DNA results weren’t exactly a surprise to him.

“Carly Simon is a good friend. I look at her lips and I’m like, ‘Damn, I got to do that DNA,” he laughed.

Johnny Cash’s daughter Rosanne was shocked to learn that her mother, Johnny’s first wife Vivian had African ancestry after the couple portrayed that she was of Sicilian heritage for years. Long before that, people had accused her of being Black, which even sparked Cash and Vivian to file a lawsuit. She always believed she was Italian and German, but Gates discovered her maternal great-great grandmother was a slave named Sarah Shields. Her white father in  1848 granted her and her eight siblings their freedom. Eventually, Shields illegally married a white man and since then her descendants were always listed as white.

But the biggest jaw-dropper was the story of actor Joe Manganiello, host of NBC’s “Deal or No Deal Island.” During Season Nine, researchers found that Manganiello didn’t share DNA with the man he believed to be his paternal grandfather.

After further digging, they discovered that his great-grandmother had an affair with a Black man. Manganiello’s biological grandfather was one of their three mixed-raced children — a shocking discovery that, as Gates told him, meant the “Magic Mike” star is really Black.

“That means, that you would, under the one drop rule, be an African American,” Gates told Manganiello at the time.

“Boy, that’s really interesting,” he replied.

“He had to call his father to tell him that his mother had an affair with a Black man,” Gates laughed.