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I had the chance to watch the Finding Your Roots episode that featured Ben Affleck and which we now know he requested be edited to remove references to his slave-owning great-great-great grandfather. That episode also included dancer/actress Khandi Alexander, a woman of color, and Benjamin Todd Jealous, who was president of the NAACP from 2008-2013. It was largely focused on activism and issues of race.

In Ben’s first segment, they spent a significant amount of time talking about his mother’s activism during the Civil Rights movement, particularly the Freedom Summer of 1964. They went on to discuss one of his third great grandfathers, who was a spiritualist in the post Civil War period. Then the show cut to Alexander, who learned that her maternal grandfather was born in Savannah, GA in 1910 at the height of Jim Crow segregation. Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. showed photos of Alexander’s great great paternal grandparents, who were born into slavery. He went further back to Alexander’s third great grandfather and revealed that he was a white man who owned slaves. Alexander’s third great grandmother was a slave owned by her grandfather.

Alexander’s introductory segment was much more compelling than Affleck’s, but it was meant to be preceded by Affleck’s realization that, like Alexander, his third great grandfather also owned slaves, also in Savannah, where Alexander similarly had roots.

Gawker obtained a copy of the script for this episode prior to Affleck’s request that his segment be edited. As Gawker explains, the whole issue of slave owning ancestors was central to the show. Here is part of the script that was cut, with more at the source. (Note that the all-caps text is narration.)

GATES: This is the slave schedule of the 1850 Census. In 1850, they would list the owner of slaves in a separate Census.

AFFLECK: There’s Benjamin Cole, owned 25 slaves.

GATES: Your third great-grandfather owned 25 slaves. He was a slave owner.

THESE HOLDINGS PUT BENJAMIN COLE AMONG THE SOUTHERN ELITE.

ONLY ABOUT 10% OF ALL SLAVE HOLDERS OWNED 20 SLAVES OR MORE.

AFFLECK: God. It gives me kind of a sagging feeling to see, uh, a biological relationship to that. But, you know, there it is, part of our history.

GATES: But consider the irony, uh, in your family line. Your mom went back fighting for the rights of black people in Mississippi, 100 years later. That’s amazing.

AFFLECK: That’s pretty cool.

GATES: That’s pretty cool.

AFFLECK: Yeah, it is. One of the things that’s interesting about it is like we tend to separate ourselves from these things by going like, you know, oh, well, it’s just dry history, and it’s all over now, and this shows us that there’s still a living aspect to history, like a personal connection.

By the same token, I think it’s important to recognize that, um, in looking at these histories, how much work has been done by people in this country, of all kinds, to make it a better place.

GATES: People like your mother.

AFFLECK: Indeed, people like my mother and many others who have made a much better America than the one that they were handed.

[From Gawker]

Affleck came across well in this transcript, he handled the realization as you would expect, so it’s strange that he asked that this be removed. Gates even repeatedly brought it back around to Affleck’s mom’s activism.

Gawker also notes that the introductory narration initially included the detail that every guest in the episode had descended from slave owners.

IN THIS EPISODE, WE PIECE TOGETHER THE LOST FAMILY HISTORIES OF ACTOR BEN AFFLECK, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST BEN JEALOUS, AND ACTOR KHANDI ALEXANDER.

THEIR ROOTS HIGHLIGHT A UNIQUELY AMERICAN PARADOX: EACH DESCENDS FROM A PATRIOT WHO FOUGHT FOR OUR NATION’S INDEPENDENCE—BUT EACH ALSO DESCENDS FROM AN ANCESTOR WHO OWNED SLAVES.

[From Gawker]

The updated version of the narration tied the guests together by their ancestor’s involvement in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

This script disproves Affleck’s second statement, made on Facebook, that these edits were not a big deal. He wrote, in part, “when I told Skip I was uneasy about the slave owner, he told me he had not included it in his preliminary cut because there wasn’t much detail – a name and no details, so he wasn’t going with it to begin with. ”

As I mentioned yesterday, this second statement isn’t consistent with Affleck’s first statement, in which he framed the request for edits as a collaborative creative process after he felt vulnerable and embarrassed. We now know that it’s not true that this segment was already cut. It’s still possibly true that Gates told this to Affleck in order to downplay his concern. However this played out, Affleck’s slave-owning ancestor was key to this episode, and Gates was so worried about removing that part that he sought advice from the CEO of Sony pictures.

View image | gettyimages.com

View image | gettyimages.com

View image | gettyimages.com