WENN
If you dig far enough back into anyone’s family history, you’re sure to find some things of which most of us would be completely ashamed. And though they have more public personas, where reputation is important, the same is true for celebrities.
According to NBC News, Ben Affleck was less than pleased to learn during the PBS documentary series, “Finding Your Roots,” with Henry Louis Gates, that his ancestors owned slaves.
Yikes.
This bit of information must have hurt Affleck, who does quite a bit of humanitarian work in Africa, because he contacted PBS after the fact and asked that that particular part of the program be edited out. And PBS, after some discussion, honored his wishes.
So, how did we learn about this?
Well, Wikileaks stumbled across e-mails between Gates and a Sony executive that told the real, full story.
For those who aren’t familiar, on the show, Gates traces the ancestry of celebrity guests and usually there are some incredibly interesting facts that come to the light. But for the first time, a guest asked that the network spare viewers some of the details.
In an e-mail Gates, having never encountered a request like this one, asked Sony Pictures co-chairman and chief executive Michael Lynton what to do.
He wrote:
“Here’s my dilemma: confidentially, for the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors — the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns. We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?” Gates wrote on July 22, 2014.
Lynton responds saying it will only work if no one knows what the ancestry results revealed.
“I would take it out if no one knows, but if it gets out that you are editing the material based on this kind of sensitivity then it gets tricky. Again, all things being equal I would definitely take it out,”
The two go back and forth before ultimately concluding that editing the information out is not a good idea. In fact, Gates wrote:
“It would embarrass him and compromise our integrity. I think he is getting very bad advice. Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand.”
Affleck’s actual name is never mentioned in the e-mail. Instead the two men refer to him as “megastar” and “Batman.” It wasn’t the best alias as Affleck was filming Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice at the time.
When the segment aired last October, instead Gates revealed that Affleck had an occultist, a Revolutionary War relative, and Affleck’s mother who was a freedom rider in 1964.
And when the news broke that Affleck asked that the info be edited out, Gates switched his tune a bit and defended the decision to cut the slave owners out.
“…we decided to go with the story we used about his fascinating ancestor who became on occultist following the Civil War. This guy’s story was totally unusual: we had never discovered someone like him before.”
Ok, Skip. It’s only right for Gates to defend his program. But Affleck is still not off the hook.
White guilt is real, eh?
Gates had it right, the first time around. The fact that this bit of information trickled out after the fact makes Affleck look sneaky, untrustworthy and overly concerned with maintaining an unrealistic image. In a word: inauthentic. Sure, no one would be proud of slave-owning relatives but it’s the truth. And as he learned, you can’t run from that. The truth always comes out.
Affleck might like to regard himself and even his family as progressive. Or he might not want to acknowledge the very real fact that in some ways, both he and his family have benefitted financially from the free labor of Black people. And I get it, that’s a hard pill to swallow. But it’s time for us–and by us I mean White folks particularly and Americans generally–to stop being scared of talking about race, slavery and the lasting effects the institution had on this country and across the world. All the secrecy has not served us well thus far.
Plus, Affleck’s story would have been far more remarkable and a true testament to the growth of the American psyche if we knew that his people both owned slaves and later fought for freedom.
