Ben Affleck: a slave to identity politics
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked
Author: Tim Black
Ben Affleck, the Hollywood star, said last week he was ‘embarrassed’. And who could blame him. From that relationship with Jennifer Lopez, which tested the gossip-mag-readers’ gag-reflex during the early 2000s, to its honking filmic progeny, Gigli, Affleck has a lot to be embarrassed about. Yet incredibly his red face has nothing to do with some sort of belated self-awareness – he remains resolutely unembarrassed by anything he’s done. No, he’s embarrassed by something a relative has done, or rather did, 150-odd years ago. As many will now know, during the making of an episode of PBS’s ancestry-tracing documentary Finding Your Roots in 2014, it emerged that one of Affleck’s distant relatives, a Benjamin Cole, was a Savannah-based slaveholder. And not just any old slaveholder.
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Wednesday 29 April 2015 - 12:28:15