The Chris Moeller Archives

The roots of Ben Affleck and a nation

One of the most interesting stories to come out of April was the discovery, via hacked emails, that Oscar-winner Ben Affleck had lobbied Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Finding Your Roots to scrub the fact of his ancestors' slave-owning from a PBS telecast.

The director of the film Argo, which turned a real-life story of a hostage rescue effort in Iran into a parable about the patriotism of the film industry, is one of us in more ways than one. One of White America, that is. We ain't proud of ourselves deep down in our guts-- and we shouldn't be. But, unlike Ben, we should at least try to own up to our ill-gotten gains. I like to believe my ancestors were honorable people too. Basically each branch of my family tree leads back to a group of German agriculturalists that arrived at New York's Castle Island in the middle of the 19th century. Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, I now like to imagine them as akin to Christoph Waltz' German character King Schultz in 2012's Django Unchained-- cultured and intelligent first-generation Americans with a strong social conscience brought over from Europe during a time when Karl Marx was scaring the hell out of the feudal aristocracies. But this is an affectation on my part. The clans I belong to have too infrequently been out front on the great social issues of the day, and anyway, the issue of slavery has never been about who owned slaves and who didn't. It's about who benefited from slavery, and all of White America sure as hell has, even those whose ancestors came after. The suffering and forced labor of African-Americans, principal among all factors, made us the richest country on Earth. The past, as you certainly know, isn't even past. Today, the median net worth of white households is 13 times that of black ones. The sport of economic violence has only undergone some minor plastic surgery. The institution of slavery, it was once said-- by someone really smart-- is just capitalism with its clothes off. And capitalism endures.

Most Americans buy into the myth of our Founding Fathers' omnipotence. A lot of us prefer to think of slavery as simply a long-ago challenge from which we disengaged as the victor, another example of the United States advancing on its generally-upward social and economic trajectory, slavery not so much a permanent stain but a conquered opponent. And while we're on the topic, why can't black people just get over it already?

Pretending this shit never existed is something we do every day. It's part of our collective routine. If you continue to dwell on institutional terrorism, you're not going to sell a lot of Chevy Silverados. Ironically, Affleck has his cherished (and financially-lucrative) public image to blame for uncovering this inconvenient truth about his ancestry. He's a celebrity, and that made him an attractive subject. Gates hasn't been fact-checking my family history, and for the entertainment of a television audience besides.

The sins of Affleck's forefather don't tell us anything at all about Ben as a man, but his attempt to cover it up tells us quite a lot. A little context might have saved him a lot of bad publicity, however. Think of it this way, Ben: If Gates' show had uncovered that you were a direct descendent, instead, of our estimable first president, George Washington, or the guiding hand of our enduring Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, your public image would have been given a tremendous boost, yet the results would be technically the same.

posted by CM @ 10:03 PM