Southern Plantations Should be Slave Memorials—Not Storybook Theme Parks, or Trump Businesses
Southern plantations teach a version of history that leaves out the very white supremacy that created them.
The Trump brothers, Eric and Donald Jr., have embarked on a new business venture to open luxury hotels in Mississippi as part of an effort to cash in on the state's blues music culture. These hotels will be far removed from commercial airports or interstate highways and will be in a majority black, economically depressed area "surrounded by cotton and soybean fields,"*according to*the Washington Post. To complete this outrageous picture, the hotels will*reportedly*be designed to resemble an "antebellum plantation."
Let's put aside the hubris and audacity of the Trump family to attempt to do business in a majority black area, especially post-Charlottesville. Instead let’s consider this key question: why are plantations still being conceptualized by white America as anything other than centers of black enslavement, torture, rape, murder, and intergenerational trauma? One answer: white supremacy.
Picture Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana. Its*website advertises it as a “tranquil retreat in the heart of Plantation Country,” offering guests the option to stay in cottages offering "all the creative comforts of your own home.” Many Southern plantations, including Oak Alley, also offer wedding packages for those interested in spending the happiest day of their lives drinking champagne over the graves of families forced into bondage to construct the lavish grounds.
In a promotional video titled “Plantation Parade”—a reference to the route tourists can take to visit*four adjacent plantations, including Oak Alley—the narrator begins with a tone of reverence:
“Once upon a time, on the banks of the Mississippi River, a storybook world unfolded. A world of romance and riches, of beauty and struggle. Through toil and dedication arose vast working farms and extravagant mansions that would become the most opulent plantations in North America.”
The video goes on to explore the architectural “majesty” of the four plantations, with a few vaguely negative adjectives like “tragedy” and one reference to “those who were enslaved here” thrown in.
It is appalling that in 2017, the mass human rights violations that created the Black underclass continue to be hidden away under the guise of ornate architecture and visions of fanciful white Southern belles in exquisite gossamer gowns drinking sweet tea in the parlor. But it’s also not surprising in a country where the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is at all controversial, where black people continue to be murdered by police with impunity, and where the KKK and neo-Nazis proudly march in the streets to terrorize communities under a president who declares there are some “good people” among them.
There has been much talk of refusing to continue glamorizing and celebrating the Confederacy with Confederate flags, statues and monuments, many of which were erected*post-Civil War in times of high racial tension to buttress white people's wounded egos. This same dialogue needs to reach the most intimate remaining corners of the Confederacy: the very homes that white enslavers lived in. These are the properties where white people meted out forced labor, torture,*sexual violence, and the ripping apart of black families daily.
America was literally built on the backs of enslaved Africans, indigenous tribes forced into death marches, the backbreaking labor of Chinese men who built the railroads, and the colonized people of*Hawai'i,Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. White Americans continue to ignore this history, and one of the ways we deny it is through perpetuating an idea of plantations taken from Gone With The Wind rather than the actual historical record.
full article
https://www.alternet.org/southern-plantations-memorials
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