Ben Affleck demanded PBS program hide his slave-owning ancestor

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/04/18/ben-affleck-demanded-pbs-program-hide-his-slave-owning-ancestor/?intcmp=latestnews ^

[Red in Blue PA]

Ben Affleck insisted on censoring the fact that one of his ancestors owned slaves from PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” the Sony email hack has revealed.

In a hacked Sony email from July 22, 2014, now available on WikiLeaks, the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., writes to Sony USA chief Michael Lynton asking for advice: “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?”

[griswold3]

“Maybe he should pay reparations from his Hollywood lucre”
BINGO!

[09Patriot]

He’s a Megatard.
That’s a portmanteau of mega retard.

[fhayek]

History is history. Your ancestor is your ancestor, whether you like it or not. Funny thing is, if it weren't for this 'racist' ancestor, there would be no Ben Affleck. Denying history changes nothing.

You know what? We all have slaveholders as ancestors. And slaves. And murderers, and emperors, and saints, and rapists, and serfs, and fishmongers, and heroes, and villains. It is part of the tapestry that is us, and without any of the single threads of that tapestry, you, I, or Ben Affleck would not exist. But liberals think that denying history is a viable strategy anyway,

[MrEdd]

Shall we go for one ending in urd ?

[fieldmarshaldj]

“Hiding Your Roots.”

[lowbridge]

“ We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?”

Apparently when a “megastar” orders you to censor and edit, you censor and edit.

[skr]

Interesting, thank you for the history lesson. Did not know that about the Seminoles.

[Ditto]

But there was a difference between the chattel slavery practiced in the British colonies (chattel means possession, which meant that a slave was not a human being and had no human rights) and the slavery that existed in Spanish colonies, where they were not slavers but had bought slaves from the Muslims and the British to provide labor in Latin America.

A little disagreement here, While under the legal systems on slavery between the Spanish and British systems were indeed different, the Spanish themselves ran a very robust slave trade between West Africa and the Americas, and they transported far more captives to the 'New World' than the British did. Also, the slaves sent to Spanish territories had far lower life expectancies than those sent to British lands, especially the North American colonies.

Mostly a difference in the work they were required to do and the climate I'd suppose, but if you had to be a slave back then, you were better off in British North America than in Spanish, French, Dutch or Portuguese colonies.

[livius]

It’s a strange story. The Seminole (which was a corruption of a word that meant wild or escaped) population was very different and interesting, and not like the current tourist-visit version.

[Calpublican]

So sensitive to political correctness he’a without clear judgment. This is a serious problem today.

Ben, people function with the light they have . Your forebears lived in a different time and place.

[livius]

You were a lot worse off in British America.

Slavery had been accepted everywhere and obviously was accepted in the Gospels and later, because enslaving your enemies was considered to be superior to killing them. However, slavery as an economy is not sustainable as you move into a merchant economy, and thus was actually dying out in Europe as serfdom (where people were attached to the land but not bought and sold individually) took over.

Serfdom itself was beginning to fall apart during the Middle Ages...but the thing that reintroduced slavery to Europe was Islam. The Muslims captured literally millions of Europeans and Asians, hundreds of thousands of them on the shores of the Mediterranean or from Mediterranean shipping.

Portugal, because of its late Islamic occupation, still had contacts with the Islamic world. Thus, the Portuguese were often asked to be intermediaries in getting back captives from the millions of Europeans and Christians in general taken captive in the 17th-19th centuries. There were many crafty merchants who offered their services, and they would charge 20% (a quinta or 5th) of the price as a commission.

Meanwhile, the Spanish had religious orders where the members offered themselves in exchange for captives, in hopes that the priest in question could preach, even briefly, to the Muslims.

The reason the Portuguese were leaders in the slave is not because they were a slave economy (such as Georgia and South Carolina) but because the elites there benefitted from the slave trade. The Pope had told them to stop it...and they just ignored him.

By contrast, thanks to Isabella, the Spanish heeded the Pope. The newly discovered people were not to be enslaved, and existing slavery was to abide by certain rules. Many Spanish citizens did, particularly if their priests or bishops kept after them, but some colonists in remote areas who could get away with it simply ignored this. However, in general, chattel slaver was not practiced in the Spanish colonies.

The Spanish only transported slaves, and did not have a slave infrastructure. The ships transported them to New England only when they had no other cargo or as part of another cargo from Africa or the Caribbean.

The famous Amistad was transporting a cargo of slaves to New England for a Quaker slaver when the Spanish captain felt bad about keeping the Africans chained and in the hold, which was the common British method of transport, let them up on deck, and told the soldiers not to worry about them. The Africans, as they approached slavery and sale in New England, rose up and killed as many of the Europeans as they could.

You were definitely not better off in the British colonies. New England did not have the crops that required large numbers of field hands, so most of the slaves there were house slaves. But the rest of the English speaking colonies, especially Southern US colonies and those in the English Caribbean, were harsh beyond belief.

Missionaries (not only Catholic, but Protestant as well) were forbidden to evangelize, because baptism might have meant that Africans had to be treated as human beings. And Africans had NO rights under British slavery. But even after England itself had forbidden slavery, the British colonists kept on doing it.

Spain was not a slave culture and did not practice chattel slavery. Portugal was obviously a renegade culture, partly because it had hated Spain for centuries after the division of the two. And I think that’s why Portugal was the only one of the Latin countries to seriously go back to an Islamic style slavery, that is, chattel slavery, which had also been adopted by the British because of their contacts with the Middle East.

[Neoliberalnot]

Ben should be forced to go live in Africa and see how well the africans left behind now live.

[Neoliberalnot]

Exactly. Who cares except the race baiters trying to keep alive an issue used to gain power and special rights, because they cannot and will not compete in the contemporary world.

[Neoliberalnot]

Yep, and it is amazing to me that any human would feel a shred of guilt for something beyond their control. This entire concept of controlling weak minded people that manipulated to feel guilty is incredibly stupid.

[Neoliberalnot]

Any comments on the slave culture of Africa that produced and sold their people into slavery?

[Red in Blue PA]

Any comments on the slave culture of Africa that produced and sold their people into slavery?

Zat iz verboten!