The latest ‘The Glass Onion’ movie star and Hollywood actor Edward Norton talked openly about his ancestors’ involvement in the ‘slave trade.’ Edward Norton joins the group of Hollywood A-listers who are not denying their connection to historical Black enslavement, calling it an ‘uncomfortable’ truth that ‘has to be acknowledged’ and confronted.
During the season 9 premiere of Finding Your Roots on PBS, Edward reportedly learned that his own family had been involved in the illegal slave trade. In the programme, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. disclosed that John Winstead, Norton’s third great-grandfather, had been listed as the owner of slaves in the 1850 North Carolina census.
It was the same episode in which the actor learned about being a direct descendant of the Indigenous American historical figure Pocahontas as well as a wealthy iron manufacturer-turned-Union soldier who wrote to Abraham Lincoln and a late 19th-century pro-union labour activist involved in the Pullman Strike. All this information, revealed Edward Norton, was something he was unaware of before and it made him ‘uneasy.’
On ‘Finding Your Roots’, Edward said, ‘The short answer is these things are uncomfortable and you should be uncomfortable with them. Everybody should be uncomfortable with it. It’s not a judgement on you and your own life, but it’s a judgement on the history of this country and it needs to be acknowledged first and foremost, and then it needs to be contended with.’
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