Getting Married in a Plantation Home is Not Okay
The racism should be obvious, but for some reason it’s not
When it comes to racial tensions in the US today, I’m not tremendously woke. I’m never up-to-date about the latest police brutality killings, I am mostly unaware of what is and isn’t a microaggression, and there are plenty of things that people call “racist” today that I’m not sure actually are. But even I can see that getting married in a plantation house is a racist thing to do.
Why would you even want to get married in a plantation house? Plantation homes were slavery-run businesses where destitute and trafficked humans worked the fields while their captors and overlords sat in luxury in the home in the center of the property. That’s not a beautiful celebration of love and family life, that’s fucked up. Nothing says “I love my spouse” like managing the slave population.
Yet people continue to get married in these houses. Tons of them, judging by the fact that these homes continue to be rental properties available to people who want a “grand” wedding.
Southerners in general seem really proud of their antebellum homes for some reason. When I googled “plantation homes” for this article, I didn’t get results like “The History of Slavery on Plantation Homes.” I got results like…
“9 Grand Antebellum Homes Rich in History and Stunning Southern Design.”
They are stunningly designed, but at whose expense? They are rich in history, but what kind of history? The article itself contains sentences like “glorious Southern homes of a bygone era,” totally tone-deaf to what that bygone era actually was.
“Southern Charm: 10 of the Most Historical Southern Plantation Homes”
Since when is slavery charming? From the intro: “historical Southern plantation homes are full of old-world charm and beauty.”
Not every search result was like this. There were plenty from architectural websites that analyzed plantation home design with an eye to how the massive influx of wealth and slave labor affected floor plans, and there were results from historical sites that discussed facts like the fact that the masters homes survived because they were well-built while the slave quarters have since fallen down because they were so poorly constructed.
But, the fact that any search results were like this unsettles me. If you’re a southerner, slavery seems like something of which you should feel ashamed — but a significant number of southerners seem happy to romanticize or erase slavery, recasting plantation homes as “beautiful sites of historical southern charm” and perpetuating the myth that the civil war was about “states rights.”
When a white person gets married in a plantation home, or throws a party in one, or anything like that, they’re merely extending the centuries-old tradition of white people taking advantage of black people’s labor without so much as acknowledging it’s happening.¹
Would I like to visit a plantation home sometime? Yes — preferably as part of a history tour that is conscious of the dark past of these places, preferably one put on by a group that uses some of the proceeds to help the descendants of the people who labored on those very fields. History is full of atrocities, and proper historical education is key to understanding them and making sure they don’t happen again.
Plantation homes are beautiful, for sure, and they are full of history. But that history should be remembered, and that “beauty” should be put in the context of the massive suffering that enabled its existence.
In conclusion
Don’t get married in a plantation home, call them “beautiful homes,” or refer to them as having “southern charm.” That beauty and charm was built on the whipped backs of slaves and should have never been built at all.
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1: But what if a black person gets married in a plantation home? Or Asian or Mexican people? I don’t know. I’m not a philosopher of race relations. All I know is that when white people get married in them, it’s not a good look.
