When Ancestry.com unveiled an advertisement last month that seemed to romanticize slavery, the multibillion dollar genealogy company was roundly criticized.
The video, which was posted to YouTube and aired on television in Utah, where Ancestry.com is based, featured a young white man in 19th-century clothing holding out a ring to a black woman. "Abigail, we can escape to the North," he tells her, interrupting as she attempts to respond. "There is a place we can be together across the border."
The ad — a concocted story not based on an actual couple — seems to suggest that black people can find meaning and belonging, if not power and beauty, by learning that they are descended from white people.