“I will die on the hill of plantations, Indian Schools, immigration camps, and concentration camps being the same thing.” ~ a comment

While all of the United States, just about, is stained with violence, racism, the abuse and exploitation of Nature…all power spots, as we might put it in Buddhism, are not equal. So let’s not normalize slavery, rape, abuse, racism…by celebrating only the aesthetically pretty side.

I’ve written on this kinda question before—

“Context, plaques, moving statues to museums, adding information and history and learning and context and teaching—that’s harder, but has great benefits. We don’t want to erase our troubled history—we want to learn from it. Lest we forget.”

…We do not learn from our history by erasing it. So the solution isn’t to forget, but to educate, as does the Whitney Plantation (I hear), or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Empathy leads to justice, and it is born in seeing and feeling another’s heart, life, situation, joys and sufferings. So the solution is a path and that path is walked by offering more education, not less. These stories are inspiring, and horrifying—and when we live in them, we learn again the motto on the University library only a half-mile from my house: He who forgets History remains forever a Child. And not in a good way.

So let’s remember Gone with the Wind antebellum loveliness is lovely, in its way, but, too, it’s all founded upon subjugation. And nothing lovely about that. True beauty is as deep as it is bright.

“Plantations look pretty. Downright gorgeous, in some cases, and that stops any and all critical thinking about the fact that Plantations are places of told and untold horror and should not be used as celebratory venues.

There’s nothing aesthetic and cute about concentration camps. So, my question is what can be done to associate plantations with ugliness because, unfortunately, there are people who will forever refuse to see plantation weddings as wrong because of their association with slavery. The only thing that will give them pause is the potential for their wedding to not fit some kind of cute and pretty aesthetic.” ~ a comment