What the world is reading: Ben Affleck ‘races’ against slavery

Huffington Post’s Cynthia Dagnal-Myron felt Ben Affleck wasted a “golden opportunity to have a meaningful discussion about the horror and anger he felt as that family secret was revealed”.

After Ben Affleck had asked PBS documentary Finding Your Roots to edit out mentions of an ancestor who owned slaves, the actor was forced to apologise.

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon, though, was baffled by his acute embarrassment: “Even in our knee-jerk, nonsense-fuelled, blame-tastic culture, why ascribe any real connection between an ancestor — whether he was a Revolutionary War hero or a slave-owning Civil War veteran — and the person one is today?”

Huffington Post’s Cynthia Dagnal-Myron felt Affleck wasted a “golden opportunity to have a meaningful discussion about the horror and anger he felt as that family secret was revealed”.

Others were disappointed by the show’s host Henry Louis Gates’s decision to capitulate to Affleck’s demand. New Republic’s Jamil Smith called it “needless cowardice” on the part of both the documentary makers and Affleck. “Gates encourages anyone consuming his product on PBS to deal with the problem of slavery in a disposable fashion, one that ignores the systemic legacy of that torturous bondage,” Smith said.

Frank Bruni wrote in NYT that the whole episode “diminished” Gates, known to be a leading African-American intellectual and a noted historian: “He exemplifies what happens when a lecturer is bathed in bright lights and gets to hang with Ben Affleck.”

The harshest criticism for Affleck came from Jenée Desmond-Harris at Vox, who saw in the issue a reflection of contemporary race relations. “It recalls the way so many go to great lengths… to deny the way the racism our country was founded on continues to shape life in America,” she wrote. “Normally, these people are… the type of people who say, ‘We have a black president! Get over it!’, or refuse to see that when black girls are suspended from school six times more than their white peers, it’s part of a pattern.”

There were also those who felt the issue had been blown far out of proportion. Variety’s Brian Lowry said the outrage over Affleck’s request had been made into “the proverbial tempest in a Boston teapot” due to “a perfect storm of irresistible elements — the delicious way the story was exposed, the picture of Affleck behaving like an entitled movie star, and the fact that a lot of people don’t much care for the actor-director or PBS”.

Source:: Indian Express