Tourists visiting southern plantations don't want to hear about the slavery stuff

[Demovictory9]

“It was just not what we expected.”

“I was depressed by the time I left.”

“ … the tour was more of a scolding of the old South.”

“The brief mentions of the former owners were defamatory.”

“Would not recommend.”


“Would not recommend. Tour was all about how hard it was for the slaves,” wrote one reviewer of the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana.

“I felt [the African American tour guide] embellished her presentation and was racist towards me as a white person,” another McLeod visitor wrote.

“Our guide Olivia offered a heavy bias with only the hand-picked facts that neatly fit her narrative and for a large part weren’t germane to a plantation tour,” one person said of the McLeod Plantation, according to a review posted to Twitter, before following up with the racist comment, “I found it amusing when she told us some freed slaves fled to northern cities like Baltimore and Detroit where they continued to thrive to this day!”


“There is really nothing good you can say about slavery but I felt [the tour guide] took it too far. His information is correct but I think he left off part of the story,” one review read.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/08/some-white-people-dont-want-hear-about-slavery-plantations-built-by-slaves/

[Beartracks]

1. To biased people, the facts seem biased. n/t

[cabot]

2. Unbelievable

It gets harder and harder not to want to flee to an uninhabited island with nothing but my wits and my dogs.

[abqtommy]

3. It can be an interesting experience to feel that (a Person or Persons) Of Color

are being racist to me/us as (a) white person/persons. Don't like the way it feels? Then don't be racist. Slavery was and is a terrible thing and whatever it takes to develop positive social attitudes and become one of the brotherhood of human beings is good.

[struggle4progress]

4. "I only wanted to see some colored happily singing as they picked cotton

or maybe a blackface rendition of Jump, Jim Crow! to watch while I sipped a complimentary mint julep on the veranda"

[misanthrope]

5. Yet we wonder how the Lost Cause Mythos arose

No real mystery to it.

[Takket]

6. imagine what these people would say about hitler's death camps........

[hlthe2b]

7. I agreed to tour the Jefferson Davis home/museum in Biloxi, MS enroute from Atlanta to NOLA

several years back (before it was all but destroyed by Katrina or one of the more recent hurricanes).
It was a pretty area, but what actually amused me is listening to idiotic tourists whose ignorance on the civil war was nearly unbelievable. It would be more irritating today, given the climate we are living through, but then the comments were just unbelievably ignorant and lent more to mockery.

I wish I could recall some of the more typical comments, but I'm guessing it doesn't take too much imagination.

So, no, it doesn't surprise me that these kind of attitudes are typical. There is a tremendous desire to create a new storyline for the South and failing that, to simply no longer teach what happened.

[underpants]

27. As I posted below.

Middleton Place
My wife and I went to Charleston on our honeymoon and took a tour.

Rice plantation. The Middleton’s made Washington and Jefferson look like hay farmers.

During the tour the young lady who was our guide was explaining how they had a quota system for work. Once you met your quota you were done for the week. You could do whatever wanted. You could make pottery, or weave your own clothes, spend good family time, hunt, whatever you wanted.

I didn’t want to start anything but I had to ask about the hunting. She said with bow and arrow or a rifle. At that point two guys who I’m pretty surely were from the North very politely explain to this young woman (look she was just saying what she was told) that slaves couldn’t touch a gun or the Middleton’s could be arrested.

The whole thing was a glossy packaging of a slsved paradise.

[yardwork]

8. Disgusting ignorance and racism.

[Wounded Bear]

9. I just had a flashback to Blazing Saddles...

The opening scene at the railroad construction site.

[Wounded Bear]

10. Was watching CSPAN3 today. They had another Civil War panel on...

One of the speakers talked a bit about how much of Civil War history has been sanitized and upgraded up to a G rating.

This is a bit of a reflection of that. Yeah, let's do history, but don't tell me the bad parts. Kind of like studying WWII in Europe and ignoring the Holocaust.

[GulfCoast66]

11. Just went to the Whitney Plantation Trip Advisor site. And I'm encouraged.

It gets incredibly reviews. I actually saw one quoted here, but by far an outlier.

Most of the negative reviews are concerning tour logistics and a couple blasting for not showing just how bad slavery was!!

So most people reviewing it got what they came for.

But keep in mind, they openly tell you that they don’t whitewash slavery. I imagine most racist know that and avoid it.

It’s now on my list to visit.

[live love laugh]

12. Yeah because slavery was a hoax! 🙄

GTFOOH

[WhiskeyGrinder]

13. I've got folding money on all those tourists having something in common.

Oh wait, the headline gave it away!

[siouxsiecreamcheese]

14. I was at Colonial Williamsburg a few months ago,

I overheard a conversation between an older woman and one of the younger costumed employees in I think was the governor's mansion. He was talking about the African slave trade and how inhuman and terrible it was and the woman brought up indentured servitude and how it was just as bad. The man repeatedly said, no there is no comparison, the African slave trade was much, much worse. The lady still didn't get it. She was actually arguing with the professional who does this for a living to verify her own prejudices. I felt like saying hey I'm of Irish descent and yes!!! African slavery was much much worse!!

[Hortensis]

25. The employee should have been trained better.

Of course black slavery was worse. It lasted for life, there was no way home and even manumission was to a society where equality was not possible and exploitation and abuse institutionalized.

Indentured servitude was a form of slavery, though, and he shouldn't have argued that it wasn't.
The slave trade arose to mostly replace indentured servitude for one because too many indentured servants died or became too ill or broken to work; some 40% died before release. But also because once released people found they'd been lied to and cheated about the land available to them after release, and there were violent revolts. The big landowners needed a more reliable and controllable labor source.

The high death rates weren't only because of any greater vulnerability to hot climate and disease. Many indentured servants were worked to death and otherwise abused and neglected by their not-owners. As opposed to owned slaves who were expensive to buy, discouraging killing them, and also could produce a lifetime of labor if minimal needs were met.

Laws allowed indentures to be extended for various reasons, and many holders used them to victimize people who weren't legally slaves but were enslaved by an often corrupt and always brutally indifferent system. Women in some places were given an extra 2 years for having children out of wedlock. A nice little additional incentive for trading a blanket or food for sex, forcible rape, loaning them to friends, etc.

So, it was regrettable that that guide did not take the opportunity to discuss forms of slavery and their differences. He's there to educate, not stand stubbornly on his own ignorance and/or bias. That slavery existed in other forms in no way takes away from black slavery. Sounds like he didn't know what he should have.

At Harper's Ferry, a guide I spoke with knew almost nothing about its overall history and reasons for existence, why President Washington chose that site, etc., he'd only been trained to talk about John Brown's raid. What it's by far most famous for, of course, but still.

[Iggo]

15. Morons. (n/t)

[TreasonousBastard]

16. The problem with articles like this is that they give you no numbers...

Were the comments typical or outliers?

Yes, the American public is possibly the most naive of developed nations, and the population of the clueless is enormous, but is there really such a huge population that is "bored" when discussing slavery? WTF are they visiting a plantation for?

[BannonsLiver]

17. I've been to Robben Island in South Africa

Our tour was led by a former political prisoner. I can't imagine writing a review "Well, what happened was bad but if our guide and the others had just not protested Apartheid they would have never been in prison. We just wanted to look at the island, we didn't want a bunch of sob stories about how the inmates were treated. "

Then again, I'm not a tone deaf, shit heel Republican either.

I've also been to Dachau. I'm not sure what these people were expecting. It"s not a god damn theme park.

[smirkymonkey]

18. At Auschwitz: "Um, I don't want to hear about all the Holocaust stuff"

"It offends my beautiful little mind". Fuck them. It's history. Deal with it.

[Behind the Aegis]

19. No, it was just little kids running around and playing...

...and adults taking selfies and pretending to be electrocuted on the fencing. Oh, and the charming, "All aboard! Choo Choo!" on the railway inside the concentration camp.

[Rhiannon12866]

21. +1000!

[Judi Lynn]

20. Who would even be interested in touring a place which should have been burned to the ground? n/t

[raccoon]

22. Some right wingers are so stupid and such shallow thinkers

Some right wingers are so stupid and such shallow thinkers that they think the slave traders did the black people a favor to bring them to the United States or the Caribbean and enslave them.

Such stupidity boggles the mind.

[ck4829]

23. But what about "history" and "heritage" that they are always going on about?

[llmart]

24. I remember a visit I took with my two teenaged children to a plantation in Charleston, SC.

Part of the tour was of the slave cabins. They were both very silent when looking at them as was I and then they finally commented at how awful it must have been to have a bunch of family members in those small wooden structures with dirt floors.

It made a huge impression on both of them.

We were met at the door of the mansion by Southern belles dressed like Scarlett O'Hara from Gone With the Wind. They even had parasols and pastel colored dresses. We weren't from the South but were living there for ten years and it was truly an education for me and my children. I also remember driving some back roads in North Carolina where I saw a Ku Klux Klan march. Until that time, I really didn't think these things still existed. It was a rude awakening. This was 1983.

[underpants]

26. Middleton Place?

My wife and I went to Charleston on our honeymoon and took a tour.

Rice plantation. The Middleton’s made Washington and Jefferson look like hay farmers.

During the tour the young lady who was our guide was explaining how they had a quota system for work. Once you met your quota you were done for the week. You could do whatever wanted. You could make pottery, or weave your own clothes, spend good family time, hunt, whatever you wanted.

I didn’t want to start anything but I had to ask about the hunting. She said with bow and arrow or a rifle. At that point two guys who I’m pretty surely were from the North very politely explain to this young woman (look she was just saying what she was told) that slaves couldn’t touch a gun or the Middleton’s could be arrested.

The whole thing was a glossy packaging of a slsved paradise.

[liberalmuse]

28. Good!

It should be so offensive that it will make you want to scream to the heavens. People sitting in mansions, wallowing in luxury. All wealth built from ripping other people away from their homeland and loved ones, enslaving, torturing and raping them. Sorry not sorry vapid White people whining about hearing the ugly truth. Those horrors can’t be “whitewashed”. I deplore any society that could practice and condone it. The South and it’s “traditions” can go fuck itself. That culture is a vile abomination, one of the more evil parts of our history aside from indigenous genocide, and may we stamp it out completely so it never rises again.