The DNA testing company Ancestry has taken down an ad showing a white man and a black woman who are in love attempting to escape what appears to be the the Civil War-era South.
The 30-second commercial, entitled “Inseparable,” shows the couple running to a secluded spot.
“Abigail, we can escape to the North,” the man tells the woman. “There’s a place we can be together across the border. Will you leave with me?”
As the ad ends, text appears on the screen saying, “Without you, the story stops here.”
Backlash was swift as critics accused the company of offering a romanticized version of American history. Most biracial or multiracial children born at the time were products of rape of women by slave owners, research has found.
Interracial coercion and sex was widespread in the Antebellum South, where slave owners often propositioned girls in their teens, according to an article in the Journal of African American History. A 2016 study looking at the history in the DNA of African Americans today found evidence that white slave owners fathered children with the women they held as slaves in a common practice that appeared to cease around the end of the Civil War.
Ancestry took the ad down from its YouTube channel. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
