Was the Ben Affleck Production Company involved in putting pressure on PBS to hide some dirty secrets in the actor’s ancestry?
Actor Ben Affleck will be taking up the iconic role of Batman in the upcoming film “Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice.” The Batman character is known for fighting the dark criminal elements in a fictional place called Gotham City. Batman often has to uncover and expose truths that lead to the ruin of rich and powerful people. And that’s one aspect that makes this story so rich with irony.
Last year Wikileaks exposed a series of emails to and from top Sony executives, which featured conversations between powerful Hollywood forces. The email in question was from the host of a PBS program called “Finding Your Roots.” His name is Henry Louis Gates. If the name sounds familiar, then you are probably thinking of the same Henry Gates that was involved in president Obama’s “Beer Summit.”
Gates was a Harvard professor who had a run-in with a local police officer on the Harvard campus based on a misunderstanding. It was the first national story concerning a racial incident with the police that Pres.?Obama had to address, but certainly not the last.
Gates was emailing Sony Pictures co-chairman and chief executive Michael Lynton for advice on how to handle a very uncomfortable request from Ben Affleck or the?Ben Affleck Production Company. Here’s a quote from the email:
“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 replied:
“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,” Lynton wrote that same day.
The two men continued to exchange emails, and seemed to have decided not to honor Affleck’s request out of fear that if this story were come to light it would damage the program’s “brand.” However, the segment was ultimately cut from the show’s final version. Here’s the reason given by Gates to the Associated Press:
“For any guest, we always find far more stories about ancestors on their family trees than we ever possibly could use,” Gates said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press. He said finding slave-owning ancestors was very common in the series, and noted Ken Burns and Anderson Cooper were two guests with slave-owner relatives.”
The final version of the show aired Oct. 14 and Gates and the producers chose to focus on the occultist, a Revolutionary War relative, and Affleck’s mother. Affleck’s mother was a civil rights activist known as a “freedom rider” in 1964.? Is it not interesting how this show shined a very different and much more favorable light on Affleck’s ancestry? PBS denies having anything to do with the editorial process of the show saying this on the PBS website:
“It is clear from the exchange how seriously Professor Gates takes editorial integrity.”
This is what’s “clear” about this story. It’s clear that this story is about embarrassment, but it also touches on so many other issues within a society still haunted by racial injustice and the legacy of “White Supremacy”practiced by its people for hundreds of years. Many people believe that white privilege is a myth, but again and again we see examples of history being re-written and/or omitted.
I say the only way America will become a colorblind society is if it continues to close its eyes regarding the truth of its past. By that time it may be too late to save America from the edge of the cliff this kind of willful ignorance is leading us to.
No response yet from Ben Affleck or the?Ben Affleck Production Company on this story.?Here is video of Dr.?Boyce Watkins talking about this story and the wider implications it has on race relations in America.
