Plantation. It's a euphemism we use in the U.S. for forced labor camp, as I've noted in the past (links below). This is getting some new attention recently, summed up yesterday in the Washington Post in a story called As plantations talk more honestly about slavery, some visitors are pushing back.
The Post recounts some of the comments from white folks who've been on tours at Monticello, Mount Vernon, and other stately homes. "You should be talking about the plants" or "[I] didn't come to hear a lecture on how the white people treated slaves."
Visitor reviews of Monticello on travel site TripAdvisor are overwhelmingly positive. But the negative comments are increasingly likely to blast the amount of time devoted to slavery, decrying “political correctness” and the bashing of a giant of American history. Two years ago, only a couple of the poor reviews mentioned slavery. This year, almost all of them do.It sounds as though the modern-day Montpelier, James Madison's slave labor camp, has done the best job among the Founding Fathers' residences at connecting the dots to the present day, while Monticello does a good job of providing a full picture of what it was like in Jefferson's time for all of the people who lived and worked there. Mount Vernon, on the other hand, charges "extra for its Enslaved People of Mount Vernon tour, discussing slavery in its main tour only in passing with the names and duties of seamstresses, valets and cooks." The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana (not home to a Founding Father) is also known as having a clear focus on the enslaved people who lived, worked, and died there.
“For someone like myself, going to Monticello is like an Elvis fan going to Graceland,” one review from July reads. “Then to have the tour guide essentially make constant reference to what a bad person he really was just ruined it for me.”
A lead interpreter at one South Carolina labor camp recounts how he was told by a visitor that he painted things "with a brush that was much too large and far too black." That camp, McLeod, is like the Whitney in emphasizing the enslaved residents instead of the owners. "Some visitors warn online that Whitney is a 'slavery tour' rather than a real 'plantation tour,' said Joy Banner, the site’s marketing director" — a "real" plantation tour, huh.
The good news is that the number of visitors at Whitney is going up, with 30,000 in its first year and 110,000 projected this year.
__
Past posts:
- The Picture of Southern Life, May 2013
- Sugar: Bad History and Bad for You, September 2013
- Rule Number 1: Don't Hold an Event at a Plantation, December 2013
- The Nottingham Free People, After the Sugar Death Camps, January 2015
- Breeding Money, October 2015
- Telling Truths on Plantation Tours, April 2016
- Fill in the Gaps, October 2017
- Octavia Butler's classic time-travel story Kindred
- Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing
- Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
- Delia Sherman's young adult story The Freedom Maze
- Sara Collins' The Confessions of Frannie Langton
- Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent novel The Water Dancer (which I read not long after I wrote this post, but I have updated to add it here... wow)
No comments:
Post a Comment