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In a statement, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. apologizes for not sharing his “editing rationale” with PBS after the actor asked for the removal of his slaveholding ancestor.
he third season of the ancestry-research program Finding Your Roots, hosted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., has been suspended by PBS after a determination that an episode of the program featuring actor Ben Affleck violated the network's standards.
In a strongly worded statement, PBS announced that the network is "postponing the scheduling of the third season of Finding Your Roots pending the production team's implementation of staffing and other process changes that will significantly enhance the ability of PBS and WETA to oversee the editorial development of each episode on a timely basis, and to ensure that the problems that arose in episode #204 will be avoided in the future."
PBS also noted that a commitment to the fourth season of the program will be delayed until "we are satisfied that the editorial standards of the series have been successfully raised to a level in which we can have confidence."
Episode No. 204 featured the genealogy search of Affleck, who, it was later revealed, had requested that the program be edited to remove a reference to his slaveholding ancestor. This request was discovered, PBS notes in its statement, only after a series of emails were uncovered between Gates (who is also chairman of The Root) and Sony Chairman William Lynton. In those emails, Gates sought advice from Lynton about how to handle Affleck's editing request.
When the program ultimately aired in October, there was no mention of the Affleck slaveholding ancestor. PBS said that the revelation of these emails months later, after Sony was hacked by WikiLeaks, "marked the first time that either PBS or WNET learned of this [Affleck] request."
Gates issued the following statement after the PBS announcement:
I want to thank PBS for its thoughtful internal review. I sincerely regret not discussing my editing rationale with our partners at PBS and WNET and I apologize for putting PBS and its member stations in the position of having to defend the integrity of their programming. Throughout my many years of producing genealogy documentaries, I have always operated with rigorous ethical standards. Even so, we have been working with PBS and WETA to create new guidelines to increase transparency going forward.
My career has been dedicated to improving race relations and intercultural understanding in our country. We are very excited about the third season of “Finding Your Roots” and look forward to uncovering and sharing many more incredible ancestral stories with our viewers.
Citing Ben Affleck’s ‘Improper Influence,’ PBS Suspends ‘Finding Your Roots’ By JOHN KOBLINJUNE 24, 2015
PBS said on Wednesday that it was postponing a future season of “Finding Your Roots” after an investigation revealed that the actor Ben Affleck pressured producers into leaving out details about an ancestor of his who owned slaves.
PBS will not run the show’s third season until staffing changes are made, including hiring a fact checker, it said.
The show, which is hosted by the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., traces family histories of celebrities and public figures, and has run for two seasons. The concern about Mr. Affleck’s relative surfaced in the WikiLeaks cache of hacked Sony emails after Mr. Gates asked a Sony executive for advice about a “megastar” who wanted to omit a detail about a slave-owning ancestor.
Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE
Sony Cyberattack, First a Nuisance, Swiftly Grew Into a FirestormDEC. 30, 2014 Scene City: ‘Finding Your Roots’ on PBS premieres Season 2 at MoMASEPT. 17, 2014 “We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found,” Mr. Gates wrote to a Sony executive, Michael Lynton, in July 2014. Mr. Gates added that this would violate PBS rules, and “once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand.”
When the episode was broadcast in October, it did not mention the slave-owning ancestor. After the emails were posted to WikiLeaks, Mr. Gates said that producers had discovered more interesting ancestors from Mr. Affleck’s family, including a relative from the Revolutionary War and an occult enthusiast.
Mr. Affleck said in April that he was “embarrassed” when he discovered that he was related to a slave owner. “I didn’t want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves,” Mr. Affleck wrote on Facebook.
In the investigation, PBS said that producers violated network standards by letting Mr. Affleck have “improper influence” and “by failing to inform PBS or WNET of Mr. Affleck’s efforts to affect program content.”
The network said that before the third season of “Finding Your Roots” can broadcast, the show needs to make some staffing changes, including the addition of a fact checker and an “independent genealogist” to review the show’s contents.
PBS also said that it had not made a decision about whether to commit to a fourth season of the show.
In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Gates said, “I sincerely regret not discussing my editing rationale with our partners at PBS and WNET and I apologize for putting PBS and its member stations in the position of having to defend the integrity of their programming.”
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This is the first time, supposedly, that something like this happened.
If you watch the program Gates have friendly discussions with his guests about their roots.
Now a situation comes up. Ben Afleck had a slave master ancestor
Or look at another hypothetical
What if he had a great grandfather who was convicted fo rape?
Then he goes to Henry Gates as says "hey can we leave that out?"
Now either he says "o.k"
Or he says "I'm sorry we have to go with the truth"
Then he could get in a fight with the guest with the guest maybe saying "I'll sue you" -which they probably can't win
So I guess this is what Henry Louis Gates should have done and stuck to his guns saying "I'm sorry Mr. Affleck, this is staying in"
And if Ben Affleck would have just admitted it and had them show it he would have looked like a better man for doing it So both Affleck and Gates played themselves It is going to be interesting to see what these men do now to try to compenate for damage control. Gates has to get more militant now to try to recover and Affleck, it's hard to figure out what he can do.
-damn, every story in the media today is on race, shyt is getting tiring
Posts: 42921 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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It is curious that Affleck should be so embarrassed about a "slave-owning" ancestor when he very vociferously upbraided comedian Bill Mahr and neuroscientist Sam Harris about their stance on Islam during Mahr's TV show.
Sam Harris claimed that "Islam is a motherlode[this is not a typo] of bad ideas" and Aflleck practically went beserk on the show calling Mahr and Harris racist for attacking Islam. Yet the founding father of Islam, Muhammad kept slaves and even recommended that it was all just OK to rape the slave girls (Qur'an 33:50).
Surely, if one defends Islam one is inferentially admiring Muhammad who was slave owner. And inferentially again: there is nothing wrong with owning slaves. So it's puzzling why he was so coy about an ancestor owning slaves.
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Aren't there an indigenous priesthood in West Africa's forest zone who keep pre-pubescent females taken away from their parents "close at hand"?
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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The Koran sanctions the rape of young girls....really?
Can anyone speaking Arabic confirm? This is sick
-------------------- Without data you are just another person with an opinion - Deming Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
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I don;t know why he is so concerned, except that he is posing as this super liberal PC guy and has now has to keep up the pose. It would have taken more courage to just come out clean and admit it, and say hey, I am not proud of that part of the family background, but that was how it was back then. I suspect a lot of fire-breathing liberals have that kind of background. The North was deeply complicit in slavery and profited heavily. The advantages of these profits were passed on to future generations, who also, got paid via inheritances and such.
^^The book "Complicity" breaks down how white people in the North profited quite handsomely from slavery.
-------------------- Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began.. Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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As if that nullifies his bachelors in history.
Your statement that Gates has no background in history is yet another of your self-serving lies.
No different than yourself, Gates 1st degree is in history and subsequent degrees are in other fields.
Neither your Masters nor PhD is in history.
Judging yourself as you do Gates you are an educator (emphasis: Special Education), not an historian.
You are jealous of his summa cum laude and Scholar of the House achievements.
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Pull a Tropicals Redacted and write the man himself directly for his opinons.
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Didn't gates weigh in on the controversy stirred by Bernal's Black Athena and basically tried to pass off what Bernal and the black scholars before him were doing was Afrocentric hogwash, trying to make certain ancients black to make black ppl feel good? Something like that I believe. And in said piece related to post he went off on "afrocentrists" and implied blacks should be grateful to Jews. Why would blacks owe Jews, Ashkenazis in particular, anything? I lost lots of respect for him years ago after learning about this.
Posts: 214 | Registered: Oct 2011
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quote:Originally posted by africurious: Didn't gates weigh in on the controversy stirred by Bernal's Black Athena and basically tried to pass off what Bernal and the black scholars before him were doing was Afrocentric hogwash, trying to make certain ancients black to make black ppl feel good? Something like that I believe. And in said piece related to post he went off on "afrocentrists" and implied blacks should be grateful to Jews. Why would blacks owe Jews, Ashkenazis in particular, anything? I lost lots of respect for him years ago after learning about this.
Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars By Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Published: July 20, 1992
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.— During the past decade, the historic relationship between African Americans and Jewish Americans -- a relationship that sponsored so many of the concrete advances of the civil rights era -- showed another and less attractive face.
While anti-Semitism is generally on the wane in this country, it has been on the rise among black Americans. A recent survey finds not only that blacks are twice as likely as whites to hold anti-Semitic views but -- significantly -- that it is among the younger and more educated blacks that anti-Semitism is most pronounced.
The trend has been deeply disquieting for many black intellectuals. But it is something most of us, as if by unstated agreement, simply choose not to talk about. At a time when black America is beleaguered on all sides, there is a strong temptation simply to ignore the phenomenon or treat it as something strictly marginal. And yet to do so would be a serious mistake. As the African-American philosopher Cornel West has insisted, attention to black anti-Semitism is crucial, however discomfiting, in no small part because the moral credibility of our struggle against racism hangs in the balance.
When the Rev. Jesse Jackson, in an impassioned address at a conference of the World Jewish Congress on July 7, condemned the sordid history of anti-Semitism, he not only went some distance toward retrieving the once abandoned mantle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s humane statesmanship, he also delivered a stern rebuke -- while not specifically citing black anti-Semitism -- to those black leaders who have sought to bolster their own strength through division. Mr. Jackson and others have learned that we must not allow these demagogues to turn the wellspring of memory into a renewable resource of enmity everlasting.
We must begin by recognizing what is new about the new anti-Semitism. Make no mistake: this is anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a larger resentment. This top-down anti-Semitism, in large part the province of the better educated classes, can thus be contrasted with the anti-Semitism from below common among African American urban communities in the 1930's and 40's, which followed in many ways a familiar pattern of clientelistic hostility toward the neighborhood vendor or landlord.
In American cities, hostility of this sort is now commonly directed toward Korean shop owners. But "minority" traders and shopkeepers elsewhere in the world -- such as the Indians of East Africa and the Chinese of Southeast Asia -- have experienced similar ethnic antagonism.
Anti-Jewish sentiment can also be traced to Christian anti-Semitism, given the historic importance of Christianity in the black community.
Unfortunately, the old paradigms will not serve to explain the new bigotry and its role in black America. For one thing, its preferred currency is not the mumbled epithet or curse but the densely argued treatise; it belongs as much to the repertory of campus lecturers as community activists. And it comes in wildly different packages.
A book popular with some in the "Afrocentric" movement, "The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism, and Aggression" by Michael Bradley, argues that white people are so vicious because they, unlike the rest of mankind, are descended from the brutish Neanderthals.
More to the point, it speculates that the Jews may have been the " 'purest' and oldest Neanderthal-Caucasoids," the iciest of the ice people; hence (he explains) the singularly odious character of ancient Jewish culture.
Crackpot as it sounds, the book has lately been reissued with endorsements from two members of the Africana Studies Department of the City College of New York, as well as an introduction by Dr. John Henrik Clarke, professor emeritus of Hunter College and the great paterfamilias of the Afrocentric movement.
Dr. Clarke has recently attacked multiculturalism as the product of what he called the "Jewish educational Mafia." And while Dr. Leonard Jeffries's views on supposed Jewish complicity in the subjection of blacks captured headlines, his intellectual cohorts such as Conrad Muhammad and Khallid Muhammad address community gatherings and college students across the country purveying a similar doctrine.
College speakers and publications have played a disturbing role in legitimating the new creed. Last year, U.C.L.A.'s black newspaper, Nommo, defended the importance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious Czarist canard that portrays a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. (Those who took issue were rebuked with an article headlined: "Anti-Semitic? Ridiculous -- Chill.")
Speaking at Harvard University earlier this year, Conrad Muhammad, the New York representative of the Nation of Islam, neatly annexed environmentalism to anti-Semitism when he blamed the Jews for despoiling the environment and destroying the ozone layer.
But the bible of the new anti-Semitism is "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews," an official publication of the Nation of Islam that boasts 1,275 footnotes in the course of 334 pages.
Sober and scholarly looking, it may well be one of the most influential books published in the black community in last 12 months. It is available in black-oriented shops in cities across the nation, even those that specialize in Kente cloth and beads rather than books. It can also can be ordered over the phone, by dialing 1-800-48-TRUTH. Meanwhile, the book's conclusions are, in many circles, increasingly treated as damning historical fact.
The book, one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled, was prepared by the historical research department of the Nation of Islam. It charges that the Jews were "key operatives"in the historic crime of slavery, playing an "inordinate" and "disproportionate" role and "carv [ ing ] out for themselves a monumental culpability in slavery -- and the black holocaust." Among significant sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.
To be sure, the book massively misrepresents the historical record, largely through a process of cunningly selective quotation of often reputable sources. But its authors could be confident that few of its readers would go to the trouble of actually hunting down the works cited. For if readers actually did so, they might discover a rather different picture.
They might find out -- from the book's own vaunted authorities -- that, for example, of all the African slaves imported into the New World, American Jewish merchants accounted for less than 2 percent, a finding sharply at odds with the Nation's of Islam's claim of Jewish "predominance" in this traffic.
They might find out that in the domestic trade it appears that all of the Jewish slave traders combined bought and sold fewer slaves than the single gentile firm of Franklin and Armfield. In short, they might learn what the historian Harold Brackman has documented at length -- that the book's repeated insistence that the Jews dominated the slave trade depends on an unscrupulous distortion of the historic record. But the most ominous words in the book are found on the cover: "Volume One." More have been promised, to carry on the saga of Jewish iniquity to the present day.
However shoddy the scholarship of works like "The Secret Relationship," underlying it is something even more troubling: the tacit conviction that culpability is heritable. For it suggests a doctrine of racial continuity, in which the racial evil of a people is merely manifest (rather than constituted) by their historical misdeeds. The reported misdeeds are thus the signs of an essential nature that is evil.
How does this theology of guilt surface in our everyday moral discourse? In New York, earlier this spring, a forum was held at the Church of St. Paul and Andrew to provide an occasion for blacks and Jews to engage in dialogue on such issues as slavery and social injustice. Both Jewish and black panelists found common ground, and common causes. But a tone-setting contingent of blacks in the audience took strong issue with the proceedings. Outraged, they demanded to know why the Jews, those historic malefactors, had not apologized to the "descendants of African kings and queens."
And so the organizer of the event, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, did. Her voice quavering with emotion, she said: "I think I speak for a lot of people in this room when I say 'I'm sorry.' We're ashamed of it, we hate it, and that's why we organized this event."
Should the Melanie Kantrowitzes of the world, whose ancestors survived pogroms and, latterly, the Nazi Holocaust, be the primary object of our wrath? And what is yielded by this hateful sport of victimology, save the conversion of a tragic past into a game of recrimination? Perhaps that was on the mind of another audience member. "I don't want an apology," a dreadlocked woman told her angrily. "I want reparations. Forty acres and a mule, plus interest."
These are times that try the spirit of liberal outreach. In fact, the Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, himself explained the real agenda behind his campaign, speaking before an audience of 15,000 at the University of Illinois last fall. The purpose of "The Secret Relationship," he said, was to "rearrange a relationship" that "has been detrimental to us."
"Rearrange" is a curiously elliptical term here: if a relation with another group has been detrimental, it only makes sense to sever it as quickly and unequivocally as possible. In short, by "rearrange," he means to convert a relation of friendship, alliance and uplift into one of enmity, distrust and hatred.
But why target the Jews? Using the same historical methodology, after all, the researchers of the book could have produced a damning treatise on the involvement of left-handers in the "black holocaust." The answer requires us to go beyond the usual shibboleths about bigotry and view the matter, from the demagogues' perspective, strategically: as the bid of one black elite to supplant another.
It requires us, in short, to see anti-Semitism as a weapon in the raging battle of who will speak for black America -- those who have sought common cause with others or those who preach a barricaded withdrawal into racial authenticity.
The strategy of these apostles of hate, I believe, is best understood as ethnic isolationism -- they know that the more isolated black America becomes, the greater their power. And what's the most efficient way to begin to sever black America from its allies? Bash the Jews, these demagogues apparently calculate, and you're halfway there.
I myself think that the great French aphorist Rochefoucault put his finger on something germane when he observed, "We can rarely bring ourselves to forgive those who have helped us." For sometimes it seems that the trajectory of black-Jewish relations is a protracted enactment of Rochefoucault's paradox.
Many American Jews are puzzled by the recrudescence of black anti-Semitism, in view of the historic alliance between the two groups. The brutal truth has escaped them: that the new anti-Semitism arises not in spite of the black-Jewish alliance but because of that alliance.
For precisely such trans-ethnic, trans-racial cooperation -- epitomized by the historic partnership between blacks and Jews -- is what poses the greatest threat to the isolationist movement.
In short, for the tacticians of the new anti-Semitism, the original sin of American Jews was their involvement -- truly "inordinate," truly "disproportionate" -- not in slavery, but in the front ranks of the civil rights struggle.
For decent and principled reasons, many black intellectuals are loath to criticize "oppositional" black leaders. Yet it has become increasingly apparent that to continue to maintain a comradely silence may be, in effect, to capitulate to the isolationist agenda, to betray our charge and trust. And, to be sure, many black writers, intellectuals, and religious leaders have taken an unequivocal stand on this issue.
Cornel West aptly describes black anti-Semitism as "the bitter fruit of a profound self-destructive impulse, nurtured on the vines of hopelessness and concealed by empty gestures of black unity."
After 12 years of conservative indifference, those political figures who acquiesced, by malign neglect, to the deepening crisis of black America should not feign surprise that we should prove so vulnerable to the demagogues' rousing messages of hate, their manipulation of the past and present.
Bigotry, as a tragic century has taught us, is an opportunistic infection, attacking most virulently when the body politic is in a weakened state. Yet neither should those who care about black America gloss over what cannot be condoned: that much respect we owe to ourselves. For surely it falls to all of us to recapture the basic insight that Dr. King so insistently expounded. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," he told us. "Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly." How easy to forget this -- and how vital to remember.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is professor of English and chairman of the the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard.Posts: 42921 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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Gates has popularized the idea that Afro-Americans carrying R1, have European ancestry.In reality, R1 among Afro-Americans probably denote Native American origin.
R1 was carried into Europe by the Kushites. Native Americans carry R1-M173. The most pristine form of R1-M173 is found in Africa. Africans also carry R1-M269 and V88. The R1 haplogroups in Africa are older than the European R1. As a result, when Afro-Americans are carrying R1, it probably relates to their Native American ancestry--not European heritage. I discuss this in my new paper: https://www.academia.edu/12204210/AFRICAN_ORIGIN_OF_NATIVE_AMERICAN_R1-M173
You can learn more about the Black Native Americans in my book: We are not JUST Africans.We are not JUST Africans, is the title of my new book because Afro-Americans are more than descendants of Sub-Saharan Africans. This book is richly illustrated with colorful pictures of the Black Native Americans. It provides a history of BNAs from 12,000 BC, up to the present. Learn about the various BNA tribes and their culture, and how the Native American slave trade in New England and the Southeast led to the extermination and decline of Black Native Americans in the United States.
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Gates follows in the footsteps of W.E.B. DuBois and may as well be a Beta Jew or Clarence Thomas protégée, worthless to any black cause. It is really irrelevant what degrees he holds since based on the flimsy body of works he's released, he uses them for nothing but selfish motives. Like BuBois, he champions the European agenda. A worthless POS! At least DuBois managed to develop some very useful text on Black history, while Gates has achieved Jack except being one of those dark faces Jews put front and centre when they need a Negro to attack Negroes. In the future expect to see an endless supply of Beta Jews play the same black-on-the-outside/Empty Inside subservient role.
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