LeVar Burton, known for playing Kunta Kinte in Roots, hosting PBS’s Reading Rainbow series, and playing Geordie in Star Trek: The Next Generation (“STTNG”), recently took a side in the culture wars. In November, he announced that he was strongly opposed to Moms For Liberty, a group that works to keep child sexualization and racially divisive DEI precepts out of the classroom. That’s why there’s a certain charming irony to the fact that Burton just learned he’s descended from a Confederate soldier.

Back in the day, Roots was a landmark show about slavery in the United States. Burton’s character was the progenitor of the Roots clan, born a Muslim in Africa who was eventually sold as a slave in 1760 in the British-controlled American colony of Maryland. He tries several times to escape, only to be brutally beaten and mutilated. He eventually pretends to be a good Christian slave but never gives over his sense of being a free man and a Muslim. We now know that Roots was historically inaccurate and plagiarized, but it still made for a good story.

From there, Burton went on to be the host and executive producer of Reading Rainbow. It was primarily aimed at children from disadvantaged homes who did not have adult figures around them to read them storybooks. I never saw it because it came along after I grew up, and I wasn’t interested in it for my children, but I’m told it was nice.

Image: LeVar Burton. YouTube screen grab.

And then there’s Burton’s character on STTNG, Geordie. Born blind, Geordie saw through a visor that gave him a vision perspective denied to people with biological vision. He was a crack engineer, a good friend, and a nice-guy loser with women. There was another thing about his character: He wasn’t a “black guy.” His skin color was irrelevant to his character, which was defined by his personality and abilities. Geordie was a person, not a race.

Looked at through this lens, Burton has had an unexceptional career and, for the last 40 years, one that was not bounded by race or politics. However, that didn’t stop Burton from deciding last year that it was finally time to dive into the culture wars. When he hosted the 74th National Book Awards ceremony in November 2023, he directly attacked Moms for Liberty:

"Before we get going, are there any Moms for Liberty in the house? No? Good. then hands will not need to be thrown tonight."

Host LeVar Burton kicks off this year's National Book Awards ceremony. #NBAwards pic.twitter.com/tQtLj8azGS

— Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) November 16, 2023

This was entirely gratuitous, but it was consistent with Burton’s attack on the group in an Esquire interview that was published just one day earlier. Thus, on the subject of alleged book banning (that is, keeping hypersexualized and anti-white books out of classrooms), Burton stated:

One of the things I'm most thrilled about is that hardly any candidates backed by Moms for Liberty won their races. There are bright spots, but these are people who would rather children not know the truth. Those kids will never know what they're missing, but it's our job to stand up for them, to be their voices and their advocates.

So, Burton is now a culture warrior on the left, speaking out for pornography in middle schools and instruction from kindergarten on up that relentlessly paints blacks as victims and whites as victimizers.

Given Burton’s recent stand, it was somehow gratifying to learn that he isn’t just descended from a white person (as is true for all blacks with roots that go back in America more than a couple of generations) but is descended from a Confederate soldier:

The 66-year-old TV star was told the surprising fact about his lineage during an episode of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots.”

[snip]

The “Star Trek: The Next Generation” alum had no idea one of his ancestors was a white man. Gates told Burton that his great-grandmother on his mother’s side, Mary Sills, was not related to the man she listed as her father on a Social Security application in 1940.

Her biological father was, in fact, a man named James Henry Dixon, a white farmer who was married with several children. “So Granny was half-white,” Burton said in surprise, per Today.

What’s more, Dixon, who was living in North Carolina, joined the Confederate Army after he turned 17, serving in the junior reserves.

Burton was understandably shocked by the revelation. He shouldn’t have been. Nothing about race in America is uncomplicated. Americans, thankfully, had managed to paper over those complications and wounds by 2008, only to have Obama and his race hustlers rip open the whole thing again for no good purpose other than to divide society and attain political power.

And it’s for that reason, the cynical political dimensions of today’s obsession with race, that I enjoy the leftist Burton’s discomfort with his newly discovered, real roots. This is the reality of historic race in America, and it’s time, as the song says, to Let It Go.