If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
I'm going to leave The Wanda Sykes Show and try to get her job because $5 million ain't too bad!
So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and. . . Wanda Sykes and John Legend. . . we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.
The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.