Stop getting married at plantations

• People are still getting married at plantations in the south, and communities across the country still use the word "plantation" in their names.
• In order to romanticize the concept of plantations, one would have to look over the atrocities that occured there during the era of slavery.
• We can't defeat white supremacy if we aren't even willing to address it.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

The debate around Confederate statues has always puzzled me. Given the fact that most Confederate statues were built in between the 1890s and 1950s, it's pretty clear their purpose was to reinforce Jim Crow and segregation rather than remember our history. Even in their historical contact, they simply celebrate a heritage of white supremacy and commemorate leaders who just really wanted to keep their slaves.

But while this debate seems to be the center of our fight over the commemoration of the history of American slavery, the most nefarious example of this racist heritage is the romanticizing of plantations in the south. In order to fully come to grips with our nation's past and undermine the concept of white supremacy, we need to rid ourselves of the soft-focus on plantations.

Symbol of hate

A plantation, in the strict definition is just a large area of land where crops are, well, planted. But in the United States, that word carries a lot of weight with it.

On the surface, plantations evoke the blissful charm of the hot summer south. A place where gentlemen and fair ladies courted each other, in front of a backdrop of luscious trees and vegetation. Today, this concept of beauty and times gone by has made plantations cultural hotspot for weddings and events.

For example, Boone Hall, a plantation in South Carolina, is a successful wedding venue. The Plantation holds an estimated 130 weddings every year and advertises "The Cotton Dock" as a "legendary structure" that has hosted presidents and celebrities. Its unwavering beauty attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors, including celebrities like Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, who were married there in 2012. It's also where The Notebook, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, was filmed. Gigantic oak trees line its pathways, seemingly transporting you back to an earlier time.

That time? The era of slavery. Boone Hall's prominence in the past, as well as its current success, can be attributed to the slaves who were forced to build it.

They picked cotton and built handmade bricks for the local construction industry. According to some accounts, there were over 80 slaves on the plantation, producing as many as 4 million bricks per year. The bricks that weren't good enough for export were used to make nine tiny cabins where the slaves were forced to live for decades until emancipation. Boone Hall is just one of many similar tourist-attracting plantations.

Slavery, and its effect on the country, isn't being taught well in schools these days, but people who are old enough to get married surely know what they're doing when they choose a plantation as their venue. In their minds, the beauty of the plantation outweighs its dark history and the atrocities that occurred there. By avoiding this reality, it makes it easier for white supremacy to operate today, because we can't effectively fight what we ignore.

And while many of these plantations have added educational elements about their role in slavery, even arguing that weddings and other events help fund those efforts, it's clear that's not the primary purpose.

The owner of Boone Hall, Willie McRae, told the Charleston Post-Courier in January that he's "not ashamed" of holding weddings on the property and most of the people at the plantation for events don't care to learn more.

"Most of the people aren't interested in the history," McRae told the newspaper. "They're more interested in the beauty of the place."

Those who admire confederate statues claim that tearing those statues down is somehow erasing the past, but the repurposing of plantations as wedding and party venues is a blatant effort to erase and ignore the past.

It's clear that at plantations, people are actively trying to forget the actual history of white supremacy in this country and are thereby contributing to it. Continuing to use plantations as anything other than educational tools is one way to forget the atrocities that happened there.

I'm not calling for the destruction of plantations. They could simply operate as museums, potentially funded by taxpayers, similar to how other places of national suffering and tragedy have been made into landmarks in the US and outside the country.

This would even help curb visitations by people who aren't interested in the dark history of plantations. Plantation site reviews often include white visitors who'd rather not hear about the slavery that made that plantation viable.

"We didn't come to hear a lecture about how white people treated slaves," wrote one reviewer.

"There's really nothing good you can say about slavery, but [the tour guide] took it too far," wrote another.

It's in the name

One way we as a country can responsibly consume this history is by maintaining the exhibits about slavery at these plantations. It's imperative to tell the whole history of the plantation. The New York Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones suggests we refer to them as "forced labor camps."

One way we don't have to consume this history is by naming things "plantations" when they are not in fact plantations. Gated communities across the South prominently feature the word "plantation" in their names.

I'm forced to ask, what kind of community is being promoted when its name is deliberately evoking our country's dark history of slavery? If you do not operate a plantation, why would you want to align yourself with the connotations of that word, if not to attract residents with a certain world view?

Some people get the value in more honestly approaching history and not just cribbing it for gain. The band Lady Antebellum changed their name to Lady A due to the connotation of the pro-Civil War South. The Dixie Chicks just became The Chicks for the same reason.

Legendary broadcaster Warner Wolf gets it, too. He was arrested last year for ripping off the word "plantation" from the welcome sign of his gated community, the Classics Plantation Estates. And he was 81 years old at the time.

Much like Mr. Wolf's literal removal of the word plantation, all of these estates and communities should immediately drop the word from their titles.

We as a country need to understand gravity of slavery and its effect on the country, which are still being felt to this day. Trying to ignore that legacy by pretending a plantation is just a place for a wedding or cribbing the term for a gated neighborhood are nothing more than blundering attempts to gloss over that history.