Before I move on to the less pressing issue of whether or not having slave ownership in your family's genealogy is something to be ashamed of, let me first call for a moment of silence because Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner are breaking up. Those moving vans we all saw in their driveway were not just there because, like all fabulously wealthy assholes, the couple were constantly redecorating their home. I've lived in West Oakland before, where I heard gunshots nightly, but even that was quieter than times I've had to stay in Marin County, only to be woken up at 7 a.m. by trucks bearing enameled lava countertops and La Cornue Grand Palais Range stoves. (Don't like something? Tear that fucker out.) The hammering, sawing, and buzzing never stopped.
Wow, what an amazing segue into Affleck influencing PBS to omit the fact that there was "a guy who owned slaves" in the actor's ancestry. The show was Finding Your Roots, public television's contribution to the Who Do You Think You Are? genre of reality TV: Find celebrities who are interested in learning more about where they came from and ain't afraid to share it with the world.
Oh, wait...
That Affleck successfully tamped down this info and convinced the producers to leave it out in the episode that aired last year was, at first, just an interesting story that hopefully embarrassed the hell out of him. But last week PBS announced, in true 60 Minutes or NYT style, that it let the whole world down by not adhering to the highest journalistic standards and it would be doing a serious re-evaluation of its process, etc., and so forth. This is all well and good, but the show isn't The News Hour. Was it a dumbass move? Sure. But journalistically unethical? Meh.
Finding Your Roots is of course an allusion to Alex Haley's Roots, perhaps the most well-known book about slavery ever written. Haley traced his ancestry back to West Africa and formulated a novel around what he found. Finding Your Roots is hosted by Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor and director of African and African American research. Gates does a good job of making us as fascinated with his findings as he is. It's not often that a college professor is also telegenic. Though Gates focuses on people from all sorts of backgrounds — Muslim, Jewish, Irish — black-and-white race issues always seem to come up. Harry Connick Jr. needed a Xanax after he simultaneously found out that not only does he have zero African blood in his double-helix (he considers himself a hep jazzbo cat, after all), but he has a long-lost relative who fought on the side of the Confederacy, not the kind-hearted chaps from up North who were all stand-up guys with no racism. So, Affleck was yet another white guy who found out the truth of his American experience and apparently felt the Shame of the Oppressor.
As for myself, I did ancestry.com and found it to be fascinating. My relatives came over with William Penn and founded the Pennsylvania colony. My long-lost grandfather also invented what would become known as the "Daniel Boone rifle." As a pacifist, this was charming. But then, there it was, and I do admit I was a bit shocked: My great-great-great-great-something or other owned several slaves in Virginia.
Do you know who I admire? People who have relatives who have done horrible things and are very open and honest about it. You can see an excellent example of this in the documentary Hitler's Children (available on Netflix), in which several descendants of people as high up as Heinrich Himmler tell their stories and explore their coming to grips with their inherited shame. To learn and grow as a people, we must not omit truths. To deny these things and not speak of them is shameful.
Ben Affleck is shameful. He has shown more disrespect to African Americans by not talking about his past than by carrying the same alleles as a man named Buford T. Bucksnort who carried a whip.
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