Plantation Tours and the Fight to Acknowledge Slavery
Photo by David Hertle on Unsplash
A Historic Destination… Without the History
Plantations are objectively beautiful. All over the South there are plantation museums where guests can view the lush greenery, giant trees, and grand houses. For most of the white people who visit sites like Whitney and Belle Meade, all they want to see is the setting. Their “problem” arises when the tour guides want to remind them who tended the land and kept up the house: human beings who were considered property.
An article from the Washington Post is the most recent piece that tackles the white visitors at plantations who don’t want slavery to be acknowledged. It covers the negative reviews that Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier plantations have received after adding on exhibits and videos that focus on slavery. Both sites have received steady complaints from visitors who do not like that the tours are presenting two founding fathers as slaveowners, nor that slavery was a part of the main tour being “pushed in their face”.
What Exactly Are They Celebrating?
Soon after the article came out, scholars and citizens on Twitter came for the people who wanted their plantation experience not to include slavery. As this is not a recent issue, they brought up other plantation-related wonders that seem quaint to Caucasians and strange to us. Like the fact that plantation weddings are a thing. And that plantation-style homes are still being built. And that some white people don’t even know that Monticello is a plantation.
All this stems from the confusion and/or contempt among Black people that the plantation lifestyle is at all desired or romanticized. For many Black people, plantation equals slavery. That’s it. It’s the history of our ancestors that we’re still reckoning with to this day. It’s the beginning of systemic racism and generational trauma and ethnic erasure. It’s still used as a way to threaten and terrify us. But white people just want to see the architecture and the grandeur and Scarlett O’Hara on the wraparound porch.
Erasing the Past is an American Pastime
It’s not surprising that plantation tours have only been showcasing slavery as an integral part of plantation life for the past five years. America is not a country that’s comfortable with talking about its racist past. There are endless examples of politicians and public figures struggling to recognize the ways slavery still affects American life to this day.
One topic that has come up more frequently the past few years is reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates opened the topic to discussion with his Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” in June 2014. Around the same time the Whitney Plantation opened in Louisiana, as the only plantation “with an exclusive focus on the lives on enslaved people.” In the past five years, the topic of reparations has been a recurring one, culminating with a U.S. House bill that if passed would set up a commission to study reparations.
The hearing on the bill showcased the one-sided struggle to acknowledge slavery. Coates gave a stunning testimony in which he laid out the inequalities that need to be addressed. But Sen. Mitch McConnell said that reparations weren’t a “good idea” because no one alive today have owned slaves. A common argument of erasure: the past has already happened, so why are you complaining now?
…But It Doesn’t Have to Be
All this talk of plantation museums and their tours has been trending recently thanks to the tour guides and staff who have been sharing their experiences. Their work involves dealing with visitors who have misconceptions about slavery and educating them. Although the work can be emotionally intense, they aren’t letting white people ignore their history.
One Black woman has taken control of the slave narrative at one of the most well-known plantations in the South. Brigette Jones is the first director of African-American studies at the Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville. She leads a tour that takes visitors through the plantation in the shoes of the enslaved, asking simple but probing questions throughout. Her goal is to have Belle Meade visitors “come away from the tour with a better realization of [slavery’s] longstanding impacts of an oppressive institution.”
Brigette Jones. Photo Credit: Nashville Public Radio
Forcing a Reckoning
In 2019, we still live in a time where slavery and its repercussions are ignored by most of the ancestors of its perpetrators. There’s still a glamorized version of Southern life that will never be less than terrifying to the descendants of slaves. However, the staff of many plantation museums are highlighting the experience of enslaved people. Their important work is the first foot in the door to making America reckon with its dark history.
