feature: “i can’t hide mine, please don’t hide yours: an open letter to ben affleck”

Last week it was revealed that actor and director Ben Affleck had asked producers of PBS documentary show “Finding Your Roots” to edit out the discovery of a slave owning ancestor. The actor states that he now regrets trying to censor the story, adding: “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.” Now Michael W. Twitty (a culinary historian focusing on the foodways of Africa, enslaved African Americans, African America and the African) has written an insightful letter in response to Affleck’s actions, in which he discusses the need for whites, as well as Blacks, to be open about their ancestral connections to slavery. Read some excerpts from the letter below and CLICK HERE to  read it in full.

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By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

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I don’t think many Black people really understand the profound guilt, shame or embarassment some white descendants of slave holding families feel. It’s not just that many assume personal responsibility for the past or that they grasp that their privilege or power is not just based on perceptions based on skin color.  Clearly these things become suddenly very real. It’s the feeling of inheritance from slavery that immediately engenders the internal deflation of the American dream. 

if you don’t own your slaveholder ancestor and I don’t own my enslaved ancestors past and the slaveholders who are a part of my bloodline–we will never know the real America and we will never know or understand ourselves. Even the most Afrocentric among us cannot find our “Kunta Kinte” if we don’t know who enslaved them. We have to share our histories, our knowledge, our experiences if we want to understand where we come from.

As more and more African Americans get interested in genealogy, because so many of us want to know who we come from, how we got here and how far we’ve come, the dialogue across the color line is especially critical. Many formerly slaveholding families have papers and details vital to the process of climbing African American family trees. We need formerly slaveholding families to come to the fore, not hide.