Ben Affleck’s 3rd Great-Grandfather Owned 25 Enslaved People in 1850
The public persona of Ben Affleck is more of an open book than most celebrities maintain. His experiences with alcohol and gambling are public knowledge. He doesn’t mind coming across as tired or annoyed in public. The Batman vs. Superman actor has become almost an anti-celebrity, representing the sides of fame that his peers don’t want us to see.
He does have a line, though. As unmanicured as his persona is, the longtime actor/director doesn’t want to be seen as having any connections to bigotry. That may explain why he went out of his way to bury public knowledge about his family.
Ben Affleck found out a grim fact about one of his relatives
The uncomfortable revelations about Affleck’s family history started with the Sony Pictures hacks that occurred in 2014. Allegedly perpetrated by North Korean hackers, a massive cache of emails and other private corporate data was leaked to the public. That included correspondence between Affleck and the producers of a celebrity ancestry series, The Daily Beast reports.
Finding Your Roots was one of the most popular shows on PBS at the time. Hosted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the show brought on famous guests and took deep dives into their family histories. The results were often surprising. But for the Argo director, some of the information was too humiliating to reveal to the public.
Gates revealed that Affleck’s third great-grandfather was a slave owner. The man, named Benjamin Cole, was a wealthy Savannah, Georgia landowner.
Did Ben Affleck’s relative stand out in the context of the time he lived in?
So why did Affleck react poorly to learning about his distant relative? After all, many Americans have unfortunate family connections. Slavery was legal for a horrific period of the history of the United States. And many landowners took advantage of that sickening business opportunity.
But, according to The Guardian, the context of Cole’s slave ownership was particularly damning. Savannah was a national center of slavery, with a third of the 22,000 people living there under the yoke of the brutal practice. Affleck’s relative was an influential figure in the area, with a law enforcement job and admiration among his fellow white landowners.
And even among said landowners, Cole’s 25 slaves put him well beyond even the standards of Savannah’s deleterious culture. When Affleck discovered that such a powerful and abusive person was part of his family’s overall story, his instinct was to shield his mostly positive reputation from any blowback.
Affleck attempted to hide his family’s embarrassing past at first
Affleck’s reaction to his distant relative’s immorality came from a positive place in some ways, according to NPR. The veteran actor’s reputation as anti-racist was important to him, and he didn’t want some previously unknown relative to harm that. But the optics of the situation ended up being worse than if he simply owned up to his family tree in the first place.
The Sony Pictures leaks didn’t allow him the opportunity to figure out how to release the information to the public. Instead, the story was framed around his worried emails attempting to suppress the story. The backlash to the situation led to PBS suspending Finding Your Roots from further airing while an investigation into editorial practices was completed.
Today, Affleck has clearly moved on from the difficult situation. He apologized, took full responsibility for the attempted cover-up, and moved on. His embarrassing family history is permanent, but hopefully, the AIR director learned an important lesson from the awkward debacle. It’s generally better to confront inconvenient facts head on, than to make a bad situation worse by trying to hide it.
