Diversity missing from the executive team and one member ignored the warnings.
An ad for the service depicted a white man telling a Black woman in the 1800s that they could escape to the north and be together offended many. The ad, titled “Inseparable,” was published April 2 on YouTube, and the video went viral, resulting in backlash. It was pulled down after two days.
ooooh my god LMAOOO who approved this ancestry commercial??? pic.twitter.com/Isy0k4HTMA
— manny (@mannyfidel) April 18, 2019
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “The effort to reduce American slavery to a benign, romantic institution is a deeply rooted tradition. After the Civil War, Southern whites… erected tax-funded monuments that glorify the Confederacy. By this retelling, the Confederate cause was noble, the war was not about slavery, and enslaved people were happy, loyal, and should be remembered for their faithfulness to slaveholders.”
“What’s really going on here, is that the people behind these ads want to feel comfortable and find a happy place,” said Dianna Ramey Berry, a historian and professor at the University of Texas- Austin who wrote the books “Enslaved Women in America” and ‘The Price for Their Pound of Flesh’.
“They think this is who I would be. I would be the white man helping this black woman. Here’s a positive story about slavery. It’s “The Greenbook” of ads.”
One of about 1,000 awful things about this commercial is it ignores the fact that for black Americans – myself included – and for others in the diaspora, DNA and documentary ancestry information is as painful and traumatic as it is illuminating. These are not love stories. https://t.co/tuTpHwmnGk
— Kimberly Atkins (@KimberlyEAtkins) April 18, 2019
A person interviewed by NBC, who requested anonymity said that the ad generated significant spikes in web traffic in Canada (the target audience), and an executive decided that they wanted to run it in the south. They were warned that it would be offensive but ignored the warning.
Ancestry.com’s executive team is mostly white and they’ve never participated in the Fair360, formerly DiversityInc Top 50.
“These kinds of problems are about hiring and they are about hearing. It’s about listening to the people in the room once you have hired and re-engineering leadership so that knowledge matters and when that one person of color in the room does speak up there isn’t a penalty. That’s when these ads stop happening,” said Jenelle Coy, the founder and managing partner of the advertising firm Spero.
My guess is that there was someone who brought it up and was summarily ignored because everyone else was super excited to green book it.
— Steve Javie burner (@hoopsshit4L8r) April 18, 2019