Ben Affleck and me

Ben Affleck, a well-known actor and screen-writer (well-known by everyone but me; I don't think I've ever seen any of his many movies, including Good Will Hunting, which I have at least heard of) has been in the news recently because he suppressed the revelation that one of his ancestors had been a slave-owner. The revelation came in a PBS series on Finding your roots that Affleck was doing with Henry Louis Gates. Apparently  Affleck was "embarrassed " by the discovery, asked that the ancestor not be mentioned on the program, Gates concurred, then Wikileaks leaked the news, and now there are a lot of red faces at PBS, etc. Affleck (who is very liberal in his politics) has since revealed the ancestor's name - one Benjamin Cole, several generations back, who owned 25 slaves on a plantation near Savannah, GA.

I mention this because I too have an ancestor who was a slave-owner - Thomas Persons, my great-grandfather no less, who had a plantation near Glenn, GA, where he reputedly owned over 100 slaves. I'm interested in Affleck's embarrassment and wanting to hide this knowledge. I'm not proud of my great-grandfather but it seems important to me that I realize that I have benefitted from being the descendent of a slave-owner.

As it happened, my grandmother, the daughter of Thomas Persons, who inherited no wealth or land from 

her father, married Wade Crockett, who was a modest dirt-farmer, cum country-store owner, cum postmaster in Georgia and Alabama, and her son, Barney, my father, grew up in a family of ten or so children in relative poverty. But still, he did go to college and become a minister, which  probably was not the case with the descendents of my great-grandfather's slaves. There is no question that I have benefitted from that ancestry. That awareness was very important to me when I decided, almost 30 years ago, to try to support an African-American man, who came into my life through a friend, Gail Lobenstine, who had befriended him. I tried to help Stanley over a period of more than twenty years, including a long prison term, and more importantly, the years following his release from prison. I may have made a difference - I 'll probably never know. But the important thing is that I felt I had an obligation, because of my ancestry, to try to do something. And I think Ben Affleck does too. The big question is - do all of us white folks have an obligation, regardless of our ancestry?

I'm reading a book titled The Half Has Never Been Told; Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward F. Baptist, a professor of history at Cornell. My son, John, gave it to me for my birthday. Baptist argues pretty persuasively that our entire economic system in this country, south and north, was built on the back of the institution of slavery, and that institution, which endured for over three hundred years and  still resonates today, was far more cruel and brutal than we can imagine, and amounted to the systematic torture of millions of African-Americans by white enslavers, a torture from which we all benefit. To put it succinctly, that torture was necessary to drive slaves to ever higher levels of efficiency in the harvesting of cotton, to keep pace with the efficiency in the processing  of cotton that the cotton gin made possible. That torture, in effect, built this country and made it an economic power in the world. This is a fact we all benefit from, especially those of us who are white, who clearly benefit disproportionately from our economy. That should give us all pause. It's not an easy book to read, but I recommend it.