A few days ago, Ben Affleck apologized for the attempt to conceal slave-owning ancestry, which turned up during research for the PBS documentary “Finding Your Roots.” Wikileaks published emails which showed the attempt – which seemed to have worked… for a while.
I find it humorous to see that Affleck was embarrassed by the facts. Goodness, if genealogists let stuff like that worry them, we’d all be embarrassed and would have given up the hobby years ago. Face it. Our ancestors were human, and they did human things… Which were often “not so good.” What I find more interesting is the apparent willingness on the part of PBS and Sony (Gates and Lynton) to “focus on different ancestors.”
Following is a teaser posted April 21, 2015 at the Variety website.
An “embarrassed” Ben Affleck admitted on Tuesday that he tried to conceal his slave-owning ancestors from the PBS documentary “Finding Your Roots.”
The disclosure was made earlier this week after WikiLeaks published over 30,000 hacked emails from Sony Pictures Entertainment.
“I felt embarrassed,” Affleck wrote on Facebook. “The very thought left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Sorry – you can’t choose your ancestors – or relatives for that matter!
Here’s a CNN article with a different spin…
Another view on the story at the Time magazine website.
About the embarrassing ancestor – from Gawker…
Enough already…
