Demos President Heather McGhee argued that “as a country, in our culture, have any collective acknowledgement that slavery happened” on Wednesday’s “NOW with Alex Wagner” on MSNBC.
McGhee, in reaction to news that Ben Affleck pressured PBS to cut his slave-owning relatives out of a documentary on him, said, “it is not actually surprising to me that Ben Affleck wanted to do this, because we do not, as a country, in our culture, have any collective acknowledgement that slavery happened, that it built our economy, and that every single one of us around this table. …It doesn’t matter if your family came here very recently. We all, as people living and working in this economy, and this democracy, are shaped by the legacy of racism in this country.”
She added, “this is a broader issue than Ben Affleck. It makes a lot of sense to me that someone who’s sort of in the very mainstream of our popular culture would feel like there’s no sort of safe room for him to even talk about it, because it’s an American amnesia and denial that we need to move past.”
(h/t Real Clear Politics)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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