It is such a shame
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
Ben Affleck was mortified to find out that he had at least one slave-owning ancestor. So humiliated, in fact, that he asked Professor Henry Louis Gates to omit that little, teeny, tiny datum from his episode of the PBS show, Finding Your Roots. The shame was too great; the burden too onerous.
This from the original script of Professor Louis Gates's interview with Affleck:
THIS MAN WAS BEN’S THIRD GREAT GRANDFATHER, BENJAMIN COLE, AND HE WAS LIVING IN SAVANNAH, GEORGIA AT THE TIME.
COLE WAS ONE OF SAVANNAH’S MOST PROMINENT CITIZENS—A WEATLHY LAND OWNER AND THE SHERIFF OF THE ENTIRE COUNTY.
(I am not screaming; this was taken directly from Professor Gate's script.)
Yes, the fact that Ben Affleck's 3G grandfather owned at least 25 people is just too much for him to bear; he'd rather sweep it under the rug and have it forgotten.
This story touches on many of the hot button issues of day - racism, slavery, journalistic integrity, celebrity, public shame.
I want to focus (briefly) on public shame. I saw the episode. I believed that what I was seeing was the complete story as Professor Gates knew it to be. Why wouldn't I? I have seen some things from Professor Gates that were just too much for me, but despite his sometimes idiotic behavior (such as running/stumbling behind Louis Farrakhan to ask him his views on Jews while they were both in Ethiopia), I respect his academic work. It was just a little disappointing to have to acknowledge the fact that he could be pressured into presenting something less than he knew to be the whole truth. O well.
My surprise was that Ben Affleck didn't have slave-owning ancestors. Shoot, I have slave-owning ancestors, and I am most assuredly not white. I am not alone. A whole lot of black folks do have white ancestors who owned slaves!
I can understand Ben's mortification at coming face to face with the monster in the closet. Truly I can, but I was struck by how Ben's decision was truly symbolic of how the nation as a whole has chosen to deal with its collective shame. Sweep it under the rug. Pretend it didn't happen. Pretend that today's slaughter of young black men did not have its genesis in slavery, for example.
Said Ben after the cat was let out of the proverbial bag:
“We deserve neither credit nor blame for our ancestors and the degree of interest in this story suggests that we are, as a nation, still grappling with the terrible legacy of slavery. It is an examination well worth continuing. I am glad that my story, however indirectly, will contribute to that discussion. While I don’t like that the guy is an ancestor, I am happy that aspect of our country’s history is being talked about.”
It is worth noting that Ben had no qualms about having the world know that his mom, Chris Anne, was a Freedom Rider:
"Your mom went back fighting for the rights of black people in Mississippi, 100 years later. That's amazing," Gates tells the actor, according to Gawker's script
Can't have your cake and eat it, too, Ben.
As I read the various accounts of Mr. Affleck's reaction to his forebear, I was struck by the contrast between how he chose to deal with it (publicly), as opposed to how one of DailyKos's own dealt with his discovery.
Look, I had very few illusions going into this, or so I thought. If some of my family's really been in Louisiana since the early 18th century, there was little doubt that at least some of them - if not most, or all - would be implicated in the trade that made Louisiana such an economic powerhouse in the first half of the 19th century. By the time Louisiana became a state, I had some six or seven different family lines already established there, and they didn't settle there for the weather. They were there to be farmers, which meant they probably owned slaves.
For his part, Professor Gates, facing intense criticism
issued an apology ...to PBS stations:
We regret not sharing Mr. Affleck’s request that we avoid mention of one of his ancestors with our co-production partner, WNET, and our broadcast partner, PBS. We apologize for putting PBS and its member stations in the position of having to defend the integrity of their programming.
What about your loyal fan club, professor? Don't you think that we deserve an apology, too?
If I may, I'll remind the good professor that there is another thing that comes not back, and it is
trust once lost.
As for my feelings about Ben, this pretty much captures it:
This is called being human. I’ve done the same and doubtless so have you. The problem comes when insecurity about what others think of us causes us to airbrush unfortunate facts. The stain isn’t that Affleck had ancestors who owned slaves. It’s that he thought we’d think less of him — or his celebrity brand — if we knew.
The bigger story is about our past, and how the unresolved issues will continue to haunt us, and impact the present and the foreseeable future.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Researchers at Stanford University have found that the perceived race of students impacts how teachers respond to reports of misbehavior at school. Color Lines: Experiment Shows Teachers View 'Deshawns' More Harshly Than 'Gregs'.
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n a study titled "Two Strikes: Race and the Disciplining of Young Students" published April 9 in Psychological Science, researchers Jason Okonofua and Jennifer Eberhardt found that teachers reacted differently to school-discipline reports when the names attached were more commonly associated with black Americans (think: Darnell) than they did with names associated with white kids ("Jake" for example).
Okonofua and Eberhardt asked a racially diverse group of 250 primary and secondary teachers to look at reports of misbehavior and rate their personal reactions. The teachers exhibited no emotional differences when considering students who'd had one incident of misbehavior. But on the second infraction, teachers reported higher levels of being personally troubled by the report when the student had a name like "Darnell" or "Deshawn" than when the student had a name like "Greg" or "Jake." They were also more likely to call for harsher punishment or to label the student with a "black-sounding" name as a troublemaker.
The study arrives amidst a robust national conversation on harsh school discipline and the uneven and widespread racial disparities in its application. As it is, black students are three times as likely as their white counterparts to be suspended or expelled, and while black students are just 17 percent of the national youth population they make up more than one-third of those who get suspended. The study gets at some of the potential underlying issues at play.
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Nigerian ground troops have joined an offensive on the last known hideout of the Boko Haram Islamist militants. BBC Boko Haram crisis: Nigeria begins Sambisa ground offensive.
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Bursting with a get-rich spirit that has made Nigeria’s economy the continent’s largest, Lagos is Africa’s first city. National Geographic: Africa’s First City.
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When I met David Adeoti in spring 2014, he was 24 and wearing an elegant knit shirt and designer jeans while sitting behind a Mac laptop in the sleek three-story office that now houses iROKOtv in Lagos. Njoku’s company has about 80 employees, with additional offices in Johannesburg, London, and New York City. Adeoti makes twice the salary he made as the manager at the Internet café. But all this exposure to money and movies had whetted his appetite for more of both. “I plan on starting my own business—something in the film industry,” he told me. He was saving money to travel to Hollywood. He wants to be a cinematographer—and perhaps one day, a Nollywood studio executive.
“It’s a very far distance from middle class to being rich,” Adeoti said. With a widening grin, he added, “But the middle class, we strive. Everyone is very desperate to be very rich these days.”
Almost anywhere else in the developing world, such a sentiment would seem pitiably delusional. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial center, “Be Very Rich” has all but become the city’s motto. The country recently recalculated its gross domestic product to take into account sectors of the economy that barely existed two decades ago. As a result, Nigeria determined that its GDP surpassed South Africa’s in 2012 to become the continent’s largest economy. About 15,700 millionaires and a handful of billionaires live in Nigeria, more than 60 percent of them in Lagos.
As with other African metropolises, oil-enriched Lagos has long nurtured an elite class only marginally inconvenienced by the squalor enveloping the city as a whole. Now the upper class is expanding, and despite persistent income inequality, so is the middle class. The growth of the latter in Nigeria, according to a 2013 survey by Ciuci Consulting, a strategy and marketing firm in Lagos, is driven by the expanding banking, telecommunications, and services sectors, particularly in Lagos. Nigeria’s middle class grew from 480,000 in 1990 to 4.1 million in 2014, or 11 percent of households. Seemingly overnight, Lagos has transformed itself into a city of Davids clamoring to become Goliaths.
This is a great African success story. And how lovely it would be to tell this bright, uplifting tale while ignoring altogether the dark and demoralizing saga of Nigeria’s grotesque terrorists, which has blocked the boomtown narrative from the world’s consciousness like a lunar eclipse. But Lagos does not exist in a parallel universe, any more than the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram does. Both are indigenous to Nigeria, a vast West African nation teeming with industrious strivers like Adeoti but also with poverty, despair, and violence. If anything, the miracle of Lagos is that its economy gallops onward even when fettered by the same federal incompetence that allows terrorism to go unchecked. A lesser city would be crippled. Then again, in a sense so is Lagos.
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Nigerian ground troops have joined an offensive on the last known hideout of the Boko Haram Islamist militants, a military spokesman has told the BBC.
The vast north-eastern Sambisa forest is where they have many bases - and it has been subject to aerial bombardments since February.
There has been speculation that some of the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped more than a year ago are being held there.
Boko Haram has killed thousands in northern Nigeria since 2009.
Nigeria's army, with the help of regional troops, has now recaptured most territory from Boko Haram
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The Memphis-born scribe's new play, 'The Blood Quilt,' is written, produced, directed and cast by black women—on purpose. Washington Post: Expanding the pattern for black actresses in all-female “Blood Quilt”.
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If there were plenty of rangy and surprising parts for black women on American stages, Katori Hall might not have become a playwright. But while taking a class in college, Hall and an acting partner were stumped trying to find plays with scenes for two young black women.
“From that moment, I committed myself to truly trying to excavate what the black female experience is in America,” Hall says before rehearsals of her new play, “The Blood Quilt,” which comes with big parts for five African American women of differing generations and interests. “It is kind of my mission statement in terms of why I write.”
The Memphis-raised Hall adds with one of her infectious, explosive laughs, “That means I’m going to be writing forever!”
“The Blood Quilt” involves four sisters — all with the same mother, now deceased, but with different fathers — meeting for their annual quilting reunion off the coast of Georgia. The premiere at Arena Stage marks a first for Hall and for director Kamilah Forbes: They’ve never been part of a show so entirely powered by black women (cast, writer, director).
That novelty gives rise to questions about opportunities, none more central than those for performers. Afi Bijou’s initial reply is a huffy are you kidding me? snort.
“Absolutely not,” the actress says. “There aren’t enough roles. And there isn’t enough variety in the roles.”
Meeya Davis plays Amber in “The Blood Quilt” by Katori Hall at Arena Stage. The play includes an all-female team of actors and directors. (Andre Chung/for The Washington Post)
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A dancer from the Harlem Renaissance sees herself on film. Black Voices: 102-Year-Old Harlem Renaissance Dancer Sees Herself On Film For The First Time.
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Alice Barker was a chorus dancer during the Harlem Renaissance and just celebrated her 102nd birthday, but she had never seen herself on film. Until now.
David Shuff met Barker while working with his therapy dog at the Bishop Henry B. Hucles Episcopal Nursing Home in Brooklyn, New York, according to a Reddit thread about the video.
"I knew Alice for several years -- my dog is a therapy dog and we visited her nursing home -- the recreation nurse and I always talked about how amazing it would be to find her films and show her," he wrote. "And we finally were able to!"
Mark Cantor of the Celluloid Improvisations Music Film Archive, which has preserved more than 4,000 separate performances, to get the "soundies" of Barker dancing as a young woman. This past fall, the group showed Barker her films for the very first time.
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