Pinterest and The Knot pressured to stop romanticizing former slave plantations as "romantic" wedding venues

[DonatellaNobody]

If there are ghosts, the ghosts on a plantation are not the types of ghosts I would want to be around.

[tuhu]

@Mister44

I’m not aware of any slave plantations in Kansas, if you know of the contrary please forward me the info. I am sure part of the reason is because cotton doesn’t grow well here.

While cotton never had a significant role in Kansas’ early agrarian economy, a tiny portion of the population did engage in the ownership of slaves and plantations in the fertile grounds lining the Missouri River during the mid-19th century.

@Mister44

There was about a 5 year period where abolitionists and pro-slavery supporters mainly from Missouri clashed over whether Kansas would become a slave state or not.

It also is arguable whether it would be more accurate to call the newly arrived Free Staters of the time “anti-slavers” (or even “anti-Missourians”) rather than abolitionists…

In fact, abolitionists were in the minority. Most of the Free State settlers were part of a movement called Free Soil, which demanded free territory for free white people. They hated slavery, but not out of concern for the slaves themselves. They hated it because plantations took over the land and prevented white working people from having their own homesteads. They hated it because it brought large numbers of black people wherever it went. The Free Staters voted 1,287 to 453 to outlaw black people, slave or free, from Kansas. Their territory would be white.

[Wanderfound]

This seems like an appropriate thread for some Akala:

Akala - Maangamizi - ( lyric video )

Because so long as they are distorting the past
It means they have the intention of doing it again

[Avery_Thorn]

That’s not fair. There were some fine people on the plantations, and many of them met tragic, horrible fates; and thus could well be ghosts.

You know, the people who had slightly darker skin and were thus held as slaves…

[RickMycroft]

@DonatellaNobody

the ghosts on a plantation are not the types of ghosts I would want to be around.

The ghosts of slavers? Roger That!

[PeaceLove]

I’m with The 1619 Project: The term plantation should be abolished from our discourse and replaced with slave-labor camps.

BB’s headline would read:
Pinterest and The Knot pressured to stop romanticizing former slave labor camps as “romantic” wedding venues

I highly recommend everyone read the introductory essay, at least of the 1619 Project to get a true sense of how woven slave-labor camps were into the entire fabric of American life and prosperity. Even the wealth of the East Coast areas that “abolished” slavery was (and is) inextricably linked to the vast economic benefits of the slave-labor camps of the South.

The 1619 Project

I’d love to see all those beautiful “plantations” nationalized and turned over to local African-American communities to use as they see fit.

[Pensketch]

@frauenfelder

Although plantations will still be able to list themselves as venues, Sivajee said the new guidelines are meant to ensure that wedding vendors aren’t referring to plantations using language such as “elegant" or “charming."

… that should fix it. No more racists having weddings on the spot where their ancestors owned and abused people now that “elegant” and “charming” is nixed from the descriptions. Good job.

[Tamsin_Bailey]

There’s a PR term for that, I think it may be called “whitewashing.”

[DonatellaNobody]

I was talking about aggrieved spirits confusing me with whoever killed them. If such a thing exists, I don’t want to find out.

[prius04]

Back in 2001 we were in New Orleans and signed up for a plantation tour. When we got there we asked to see the slave quarters but were informed they had been destroyed and they weren’t completely sure where they had been. My wife got quite angry, as did I to a lessor extent, and demanded our money back. They tried to refuse but my wife was a writer and exaggerated the potential of what she could write. This was before Yelp and FB but we got our money back. Now whenever we do a tour of a mansion or whatever, we make it clear to ask would the tour include the house staff quarters. And if not, we’d make it clear that we’d try again in the future when they fixed that. (Live in Rhode Island so slave quarters up here disappeared about 100 years before Louisiana. So remnants of them are long gone, though the forests are filled with the stone walls they built.)

[alahmnat]

Why is Pinterest seemingly the only prime-time social media site of any kind that’s even bothering to try to do the right thing in managing the content it surfaces to its users? While Facebook and Twitter spend their time wringing their hands over all of the good rhetorical points Nazis have and how you really have to hand it to them for their fashion sense, Pinterest is busy blocking the circulation of anti-vax memes and getting involved in tearing down the white supremacy of slave plantations.

It’s almost enough for me to forgive them for endlessly polluting image search (and especially reverse search) results with page after page of identical pins with different URLs.

[bobtato]

Where I live, I can’t so much as post a letter or buy milk without walking through the sites of a thousand years of murders, workhouses, plague pits, sex trafficking etc. So it initially seems odd to me to think of boycotting a place based on its grim history. Indeed, the tendency round here is more to celebrate the fact that (say) Jack the Ripper used to pick up victims in a given pub, because now he’s dead and you’re having a nice time there instead.

In the US, though, I guess a lot of places only have one chapter in their (post-Columbian) history. The story of a plantation house is pretty much “there was a forest, then people built a slave labor camp here, and now you want to book it for your wedding”. So it does read differently.

In any case I think we can all agree that the real, living horror is Pinterest. “Please hand over your social media deets before you can even click this link to a third-party site which we have pushed to the bottom of Google’s ranking”. NOT TODAY, SATAN’S SCRAPBOOK

[RexDart]

I think changing the name of the place and leaving out the word “plantation” would be a good start. If it’s a wedding venue just call it “The East Bumfuk Wedding Hall.” If it’s being preserved for historical significance keep the name and don’t market it as a place for a good time.

[Tamsin_Bailey]

@bobtato

SATAN’S SCRAPBOOK

Excuse me, I need to go update my Bookmarks list…

[tuhu]

White-washing the place and intentionally hiding its history isn’t a great option.

The more profound point is to remember the significance of what happened, not to erase it just so that people can have more options for places to have wedding receptions.

Your second suggestion is better.

[Mister44]

@Brainspore

In that case she was making a case for how far the nation had come in the pursuit of its highest ideals over the previous 240 years, which made the White House seem like a symbol of hope and promise that had grown from troubling origins.

In the case of these plantations it seems like the people marketing them as romantic venues want to skip right past all those horrific origins and just focus on the aesthetics of the locale without contemplating the suffering that made such beauty possible.

I think that’s a good point. If we want to look closer at what is around us, we have a lot scars. The White House is just one of many buildings at least partly built by slaves in the US, or a building who passed laws legalizing and regulating slavery in the past. But generally we don’t think of that history first when thinking about those buildings.

Now plantations are different than government buildings because their purposes were different. But could there be a path of redemption other than museums (Which, for the record, I have heard negative things about some of the museums too. Some of them giving… charitable recounts of history.)

For example, a minority arts society used one for artist space, exhibits, and events. Would it be like the White House where it is seen as a sign of progress through being repurposed, or no?

@Shuck

They’re inevitably capitalizing on a grotesquely romanticized historical (slavery) narrative to some degree . They have to, because it would be impossible to see it as a romantic venue otherwise.

Well per my first post, I agree that the romanticizing is bullshit. I am not sure I agree that one can’t enjoy the venue for other reasons besides it previously being a plantation. You can find similar architecture where the building WASN’T a plantation and they are still enjoyed for what they are.

@Shuck

altered to make the connection to that past unrecognizable

I guess that is what I am asking - is there a path to re-purposing these venues, and if so, what does that look like.

@DonatellaNobody

I would rather destroy a plantation than have it do feel-good tours for white people’s benefit, though.

I agree that “feel good tours” are bullshit.

@tuhu

While cotton never had a significant role in Kansas’ early agrarian economy, a tiny portion of the population did engage in the ownership of slaves and plantations in the fertile grounds lining the Missouri River during the mid-19th century.

Right, per my next sentence I acknowledged Kansas had slaves. Wheat was(is) one of the main crops of Kansas and it isn’t nearly as labor intensive as cotton, hence those who owned slaves generally had a handful, vs dozens. (Though tobacco and hemp were also plantation crops.)

The Missouri River separates Kansas from Missouri in the Northeast corner of the state. I actually know of a few houses on the Missouri side that are former plantations (there is a living history town around one of them). While I imagine there could have been a farm big enough to be considered a plantation on the Kansas side, I am not aware of any surviving houses, and certainly not in the plantation style we are talking about. Though if you find examples beyond a sentence of a sparsely worded wiki article, I’d love to know about them! But yes, per your original point, I don’t think any of them are being marketed as such.

@tuhu

It also is arguable whether it would be more accurate to call the newly arrived Free Staters of the time “anti-slavers” (or even “anti-Missourians”) rather than abolitionists…

I suppose if you want to play semantics with labels you’re right, but the abolitionists were the ones most engaged in the violence against the Slavers/Missourians.

Per your source

In retaliation, the fiery abolitionist John Brown led a group of men on an attack at Pottawatomie Creek. The group, which included four of Brown’s sons, dragged five proslavery men from their homes and hacked them to death.

per your other source

The presence of slaveowners in Kansas… served as a motivating factor for Northern abolitionist movements to move into the Kansas territory in order to prevent such efforts from succeeding.

FYI - John Brown is immortalized in the capital building by Regionalist John Steurt Curry.

[Brainspore]

@Mister44

Now plantations are different than government buildings because their purposes were different. But could there be a path of redemption other than museums (Which, for the record, I have heard negative things about some of the museums too. Some of them giving… charitable recounts of history.)

For example, a minority arts society used one for artist space, exhibits, and events. Would it be like the White House where it is seen as a sign of progress through being repurposed, or no?

I could imagine something like that working, especially if management of the property was passed on to the descendants of the people once enslaved there. There is no denying that many plantation homes have an aesthetic beauty to them, but it’s a beauty that was only made possible through immense suffering and any use of the buildings must acknowledge that.

[tuhu]

Thank you for telling me that John Brown existed. I never said that abolitionists didn’t exist or fight, just that they could arguably be considered the minority of that mass of white people who moved to Kansas to prevent Kansas from being a slave state, considering most of the new arrivals voted to outlaw black people completely.

And even that was only to give you a slight correction to your statement that there were never plantations in Kansas.

[moortaktheundea]

@mcsnee

What, even, is the scope of the problem? Are we talking about 100 plantations or 10,000?

The only number I could find says roughly 6,000. I’m sure there’s some variation in the number based on how you count reconstructions, subdivided properties, and other weird edge cases. Either way it accounts for a pretty substantial portion of all large historic architecture in a large part of the country.

[Shuck]

@Mister44

I am not sure I agree that one can’t enjoy the venue for other reasons besides it previously being a plantation.

But in this case, those plantations are absolutely referencing their history, or at least their romanticized version of it. Any venue calling itself a plantation in the South is doing that right off the bat, as part of its sales strategy, no less.