How Ben Affleck’s Shame Over a Slave-Owning Ancestor Screwed Henry Louis Gates and PBS’ Finding Your Roots
PBS and WNET are conducting an internal review led by our respective programming teams of the circumstances around Finding Your Roots episode ‘Roots of Freedom.’ This matter came to PBS’ attention on Friday morning, April 17th. Professor Gates and his producers immediately responded to our initial questions. In order to gather the facts to determine whether or not all of PBS’ editorial standards were observed, on Saturday, April 18th, we began an internal review. We have been moving forward deliberately yet swiftly to conduct this review.” —Joint statement from PBS and New York’s WNET public television, on Tuesday
Anyone who has regularly watched PBS’ Finding Your Roots—a show hosted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. that traces the family history of celebrities using genealogy and genetic research—knows that once in a while, a white person will discover that an ancestor owned slaves. This is inevitable—trace the past of enough people, and you will find southern roots, and some of those southerners will have owned slaves before the Civil War. It’s an ugly historical reality, but also an inescapable one, and it’s led to some fascinating moments on the show. Gates handles these revelations with great tact, and there’s no overwhelming sense of guilt or shame foisted onto the guest. At least on an individual level, there’s no responsibility to be shouldered 150 years down the line.
When Ben Affleck appeared on Finding Your Roots in an episode that aired last October, Gates found that one of his forebears, Benjamin Cole, owned 25 slaves in Georgia as late as 1850. Affleck responded normally, but after the taping, his PR people reached out to Gates and asked him to remove that segment from the final broadcast—an almost literal whitewashing. Gates had a difficult choice to make—on one hand, he could stand up to Affleck, risk angering him and perhaps compromising his future goodwill with celebrities, to uphold PBS’ journalistic standards.
Instead, Gates capitulated, wiped the Benjamin Cole segment, and has backed himself into a corner due to a confluence of strange events that may end up costing him nothing less than his integrity.
The reason any of this came to light, and spread beyond Gates and Affleck’s circles, goes back to the Sony email hack that exposed more than 30,000 private documents (which are now searchable on WikiLeaks). It seems that there’s no end to the fallout from the North Korean cyberterrorism, and Gates is the latest victim.
As it turns out, Gates emailed Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton for advice when Affleck first requested that he remove the slavery content from the program. The relevant exchange, now available due to the leaks:
Gates: 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?
Lynton: On the doc the big question is who knows that the material is in the doc and is being taken out. 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.
Gates: As for the doc: all my producers would know; his PR agency the same as mine, and everyone there has been involved trying to resolve this; my agent at CAA knows. And PBS would know. To do this would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman.