Ben Affleck Asked PBS TV Show to Hide his Slave-Owning Ancestor

Photo taken by Josh Jensen, courtesy of Creative Commons

By now we've probably all heard about how it was recently leaked that when doing the PBS show, "Finding Your Roots," Ben Affleck asked producers to hide his slave-owning ancestor.  If you're not familiar with the story I'm talking about, you can read about it here.  Now, I'm not going to beat around the bush - I think it was a creepy, shady move on Affleck's part and I think it was a bad decision on the part of PBS to cave to pressure from Hollywood and leave it out, if they had originally intended to include it.

First of all, if you're white in America, and trace your ancestry back far and widely enough, you are most likely going to discover you have someone in your family tree who owned a slave.  It sucks.  It's sad.  It's terrible.  But it did happen back then.  Hiding it, or trying to pretend that it didn't exist is a slap in the face to the memory of those who were slaves.  Philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and I believe in that philosophy 100%.  Pretending something didn't happen, doesn't make it so.

You may not always find exactly what you're looking for when you decide to delve into family history research.  In fact, it has been my personal experience that you sometimes don't find what you're looking for at all.  But what you do find is history.  And learning from the new information that you discover about your family's history, both the good and the bad, and applying that knowledge to your own life makes you a more understanding, more complete person.