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PBS program hide his slave-owning ancestor"
Ben Affleck insisted on censoring the fact that one of his ancestors owned slaves from PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” the Sony email hack has revealed.
In a hacked Sony email from July 22, 2014, now available on WikiLeaks, the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., writes to Sony USA chief Michael Lynton asking for advice: “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?”
Twitter JeffB commented...
13 comments:
No personal shame for him. He didn't choose his ancestors, but he knows certain people would make him regret learning it. I understand not wanting to give those people ammunition.
PBS comes off far worse here than Affleck, simply because it leads to the question of who else did the edit things for?
"See Everything New From the World of Sony"
Everything New is defined as whatever's on their servers.
This is why you should never send them emails.
Did Henry Louis Gates Jr. admit that his ancestors were house schvartzes? I mean how can you be down for the struggle when your ancestors never broke a sweat?
A hollywood leftist has a family history that includes slave owners.
Hush hush!
I think a lot of these Hollywood libs are like Affleck.
Ironically, it's really about appearances. In the drive to appear to be better than other people, namely conservatives, you stand accused by your own inhumanly sainthood standards.
Racism, homophobia, sexism are just the vehicles to looking good.
I saw Valerie Jarrett on the Gates show. She had ancestors in the 18th century who became emancipated and went on to own their own slaves.......I did the Ancestry thing. My ancestors did not own slaves and, in the 19th century, many of them were illiterate. Poor white people were generally opposed to slavery. They weren't that far from serfdom or indentured bondage. Slavery was a trapdoor that they might very well fall into, and they wanted it gone.
Some clever person could tie this ancestral guilt thing in with the concept of original sin and get a halfway decent joke out of it.
I'd give it a shot but I'm out of time and I have to go cook the steaks.
Affleck's from Boston, not Hollywood.
I'd guess he was more embarrassed than ashamed.
Nevertheless, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Even if PBS was silly to indulge his editorializing (they claim they clipped it for other reasons), seeing that leaked email was a bit of a guilty pleasure. So many Sony emails leaked, so few were all that incriminating of anyone just being a general douchebag.
Except for this one. ;-)
The funny thing is, Bryan Sykes claims that 50% of Afro-American males have European Y chromosomes. If it's not embarrassing to AAs that so many of them were directly descended from slaveowner-raped great-great-great-grandmamas, then I'm not sure all these whites should care that a number of them (on the show) can find a slaveowner or two in their family tree.
I'm not sure which would be more embarrassing. I think the bigger mindfuck though would be an AA finding out that his male lineage traces all the way back to a raped slave.
That would really fuck me up.
Reality Control: He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past. Straight out of 1984.
Yep -the bigger issue is Afflecke's attempt to hide it.
So Hillary of him. Gross.
I can sort of understand him wanting to suppress this information, but at the same time, he had a real opportunity to say, "You know what, this is what my ancestors did and I'm not proud of that, but it is what it is and I'm trying to live my life every day with the reality and idea that the America we have today is not that America when they were alive. That's what I teach my children, that's what I hope to convey to people who know me. It's a vastly better America and I reject any assertion that I am my ancestors."
But nope, hiding the truth is sometimes worse than lying about it. The fact that PBS was complicit only makes it self-confirming that they are not interested in the truth at all only a carefully crafted, scripted, and highly sculpted narrative.
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