Edward Norton, Julia Roberts call their ancestral history of slave trade 'uncomfortable'

Hollywood actor Edward Norton, who we recently saw in the film ‘The Glass Onion’, opened up about his ancestral history of “slave trade”. Calling it an “uncomfortable” truth that “needs to be acknowledged” and contended with, Edward Norton joins the league of A-listers from Hollywood who are not denying their relationship with historical slavery of the Black people.

Edward apparently discovered that his own ancestors were involved in the dark trade of slaves during the season 9 premiere of PBS’ Finding Your Roots. In the episode, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed that Norton’s third great-grandfather, John Winstead, had a record of owning enslaved people 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”.

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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.”

Another celebrity who featured on the episode was Julia Roberts. She also learned her ancestors, her fourth great-grandfather Edward Townsend, had owned enslaved people on a farm of 2,000 acres. She said, “You have to figure if you’re from the South, you’re on one side of it or the other.

“You can’t turn your back on history even when you become a part of it in a way that doesn’t align with your personal compass,” she added.