Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.
For the 12th season of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots” (8 p.m. Tuesday, WQED-TV), Pittsburgh-raised music star Wiz Khalifa is among the celebrities who learn about their ancestry.
The series returns this week with an examination of the family histories of actors Darren Criss and America Ferrera; Khalifa’s episode debuts Jan. 13.
Titled “Great Migrations,” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. welcomes Khalifa and actress Sanaa Lathan, who both have ancestors who left the American South in search of better lives in the North.
The first part of Khalifa’s portion of the episode explores the music maker’s rise to fame.
“I was trying to be hard,” Khalifa says of his early efforts while still in high school in Pittsburgh. “Everybody was tough at that time. … You gotta be tough to come up through Pittsburgh.”
Khalifa says the key was to find his lane: Funny, smart, educated.
“I think what I did was outwork a lot of people,” he adds.
Born Cameron Jibril Thomas in Minot, N.D., Khalifa moved to Pittsburgh, just as his great-grandfather, Willie “Papa Bush” Wimbush Jr. did after serving in an all-Black unit in World War II and returning to the Jim Crow South, where Black veterans were targeted with violence. By 1955, Wimbush and his wife settled in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.
Gates also dives deeper into Khalifa’s past, discovering the identity of Khalifa’s enslaved fifth great-grandfather, who registered to vote in the South despite racist threats.
A “Finding Your Roots” publicist said neither Gates nor Khalifa, who was sentenced in absentia last month to nine months in a Romanian prison for smoking marijuana on stage during a 2024 concert (a Romanian criminologist said it’s unlikely Khalifa will be extradited to Romania to serve that sentence), were available for interviews.
Other celebrities featured on this season of “Finding Your Roots” include Kate Burton, Lizzy Caplan, Kristin Chenoweth, Liza Colón-Zayas, Danielle Deadwyler, Barry Diller, Flea, Rhiannon Giddens, Brittney Griner, Sara Haines, Spike Lee, Tracy Letts, Delroy Lindo, Lizzo, Hasan Minhaj and Chris Paul.
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