Singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco recently cancelled her “Righteous Retreat in the Big Easy,” a song-writing retreat hosted at the Nottoway Plantation and Resort, a former slave plantation in Louisiana. The venue choice provoked well-deserved outrage, prompting DiFranco to cancel. DiFranco issued what Callie Beusman at Jezebel called “a remarkably unapologetic ‘apology,'” defending her actions more than apologizing for them.
The Nottoway Plantation and Resort doesn’t illuminate the brutal history of slavery; it whitewashes and glorifies slavery. The resort’s website claims that “Randolph [Nottoway] knew that in order to maintain a willing workforce, it was necessary to provide not only for his slaves’ basic needs for housing, food and medicine, but to also offer additional compensation and rewards when their work was especially productive.” Rather than highlighting the rights violations inherent in enslaving human beings, the resort euphemistically calls slaves a “willing workforce” and advertises the supposed benefits slaves received.
The site also brags that “A dramatic, multi-million-dollar renovation has restored this historic plantation to her days of glory.” I wouldn’t call days of slavery, abuse, and exploitation “days of glory.”
The problem here goes beyond sanitizing the history of slavery. We should ask ourselves why this plantation still exists at all. We should ask why wealthy white people still own it. The slaves mixed their labor with the soil, developing it. They, not the slave-owning criminals who retained title after the Civil War, worked and toiled on the land. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote,
“elementary libertarian justice required not only the immediate freeing of the slaves, but also the immediate turning over to the slaves, again without compensation to the masters, of the plantation lands on which they had worked and sweated.”
But this justice was denied. Black freedmen did not own their own land, and were instead forced to work for those who had unjustly monopolized the land. Slavery gave way to sharecropping, exploitative wage labor, unemployment, and other forms of exploitation of structural poverty. The ongoing structural poverty that plagues communities of color can largely be traced to slavery and the related land monopoly. This is a good example of what Kevin Carson calls “the subsidy of history,” in which historical violence and plunder plays a critical role in the modern economic order.
The plantation lands remained in the hands of slave owners, eventually passing into the hands of wealthy capitalists. Currently, the Nottoway Plantation is owned by the Paul Ramsay Group investment firm. The firm’s owner, Paul Ramsay, is one of the largest political donors in Australia, donating handsome sums to the right-wing, homophobic, misogynistic politicians of Australia’s Liberal Party.
This ongoing legacy of slavery isn’t just apparent in land monopolization and the ruling class’s profit from “plantation resorts.” The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” So after slavery’s formal abolition, Southern states passed Black Codes, effectively criminalizing black people. This enabled Southerners to continue enslaving blacks, using the so-called the “convict lease system.” Some plantations were converted to prisons. The Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, is a converted slave plantation where blacks are still exploited for their agricultural labor. The racism of slavery persists; 60% of prisoners are people of color.
From criminal punishment to economic order, our society is pervasively shaped by slavery. This is upheld through an ideology and structure of racism. Kylie Brooks, an activist who organized against holding the retreat at the plantation, put it well:
The Ani DiFranco debacle is one in a pattern of many, many daily experiences of anti-blackness — a global phenomenon — that Black folks have to struggle through daily. Anti-blackness in particular refers back to the ancestral experiences of enslavement and ongoing current experiences of the prison system, both as genocidal phenomenons.
Resisting anti-black racism means standing against the land monopoly, the prison system and all other systems of oppression.
Translations for this article:
Citations to this article:
- Nathan Goodman, Ani DiFranco, Slavery and the Subsidy of History, Before It’s News, 01/02/14
- Nathan Goodman, Ani DiFranco, Slavery and the Subsidy of History, Counterpunch, 01/03/14
Thanks, Nathan, for contextualizing this situation. Great quote from Kylie Brooks!
wow ok so the place has a past. if it's a nice place to go for a retreat then I would go. spending time someplace doesn't make one a racist. my goodness enough is enough already get the heck out of ancient history and look foreword to tomorrow
”Randolph [Nottoway] knew that in order to maintain a willing workforce, it was necessary to provide not only for his slaves’ basic needs for housing, food and medicine, but to also offer additional compensation and rewards when their work was especially productive.”
In what way is this statement a whitewash? It vividly illustrates the patronizing rationale of a conscientious slave owner or welfare wage-state tax collector.
I like how capitalism (colloquially used to replace mercantilism) is always used by leftarchists like libertarians use Hitler. Every thing compares to it, even when you have no idea what it is.
You appear to have misquoted the Nottoway web site. It reads "Randolph knew that in order to maintain a COMPLIANT workforce," (emphasis mine), not "willing workforce". It changes the context considerably, as your point hinges on the idea that the Nottoway organization is glossing over the slaves' compulsion by showing how well they were cared for and thus more "willing", instead of just being more likely to follow orders ("compliant").
This is the page I found it on: http://www.nottoway.com/html/nottoway-plantation-…
Did you find your quote elsewhere, or did you change it?
But it's more than just the past. The owners of the estate seem to be making it clear that they liked the way things were, want to go back to the "good old days".
Here goes thorax232 again, trolling every anti-capitalistic article.
What is capitalism then? Dictionary's definition: "a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government."
Sheldon Richman: "a system in which the means of production are de jure privately owned."
Kevin Carson criticizes the fallacy of equivocation by equating "capitalism" with "free(d) market" (which throax232 & vulgar "libertarians" fall victim to):
"There’s no obvious reason, in seeking a name for an economy in which all factors of production are ostensibly equal and enter into free contract as equals, that capital should be singled in particular out for special emphasis. The choice of “capitalism” suggests some special ideological agenda, as if the system were run of, by and for capital as distinguished from other factors of production."
"The control of the state by the owners of one “factor of production” (capital), and the use of state power to terrorize the owners of another “factor of production” (labor-power) on behalf of capital, is just as repugnant to free market principles as the reverse case."
"The state’s enforcement of artificial scarcity in land and capital, by maintaining entry barriers and other special privileges on behalf of landlords and capitalists, makes the means of production artificially scarce and expensive for workers so that they are forced to sell their labor in a buyer’s market. Instead of jobs competing for workers and driving down the rate of profit until wages equal the full product of labor, which would be the case in a free market without such special privilege, we have instead a state of affairs in which workers are forced to compete for jobs and drive down wages, and pay a form of tribute for access to the means of production."
"In neoliberal orthodoxy, supposedly, labor and capital are just coequal “factors of production.” So why name an economic system after one of the factors of production, in particular? What we’re seeing is that, beneath the ideological veneer of “free contract” and all the rest of it, some “factors of production” are more equal than others. That’s why, when Costco pays its workers above-average wages for the retail industry, business analysts squirm with the same undisquised moral disapproval that some people reserve for diamond-studded dog collars. But when a Bob Nardelli or Carly Fiorina gets a retirement package worth tens or hundreds of millions, after gutting their companies to massage the quarterly numbers and game their own bonuses and stock options, that’s just the way “our free enterprise system” rewards them for “the value they created.”
What the politicians and journalists are for, behind all the “pro-market” rhetoric, isn’t the market at all. It’s the interests of capital."
Had thorax232 bothered to read what Goodman had written (& agreed upon by Rothbard)?
"The slaves mixed their labor with the soil, developing it. They, not the slave-owning criminals who retained title after the Civil War, worked and toiled on the land…
Black freedmen did not own their own land, and were instead forced to work for those who had unjustly monopolized the land. Slavery gave way to sharecropping, exploitative wage labor, unemployment, and other forms of exploitation of structural poverty. The ongoing structural poverty that plagues communities of color can largely be traced to slavery and the related land monopoly. This is a good example of what Kevin Carson calls “the subsidy of history,” in which historical violence and plunder plays a critical role in the modern economic order.
The plantation lands remained in the hands of slave owners, eventually passing into the hands of wealthy capitalists."
The Civil War must have fought to free the slaves, then. Northern capitalists had not waged the Civil War to wrench southern resources & Blacks' labor from southern slave-owners & to prevent slavery from spreading into western lands, which capitalists' gross entitlement mentality told them they deserve those western lands for development & progress, not slave-owners & simple-minded homesteaders. O I for got, & northern capitalists had not taken advantage of government interventions to rob indigenous peoples of their lands, prevent homesteading & self-employment, & then used those lands to build infrastructures where workers must toil on the owners' terms & enrich the latter.
The 13th Amendment was adopted in 1865. That's just 149 years ago, hardly ancient history. And as I discuss in the article, the injustices continued, in the form of land monopoly and resulting economic exploitation as well as the criminalization of black people.
The uproar was from Ani DiFranco's own fans, each of whom refused to hand her $1,000/ticket because she'd decided to to choose for a concert site a former plantation where slaves had been confined & coerced to work.
About your analogy: Anybody who would have participated in DiFranco's concert at the former slave-plantation would have to pay $1,000, & but none shall have to pay you any money if you'd have been gone on a vacation to the same old plantation site. DiFranco's fans just refused to pay her, so she cancelled the concert rather than getting no money from her fans to at least recoup the concert's costs.
Because that patronizing rationale also carries through in the attitude of the current caretakers who wrote it. He "knew"; he didn't "believe."
It's also worth noting that the website has since replaced "willing" with "compliant" in the past day or so. I fail to see how that makes it any better, since I imagine that, you know, the threat of severe punishment or death, rather than "compensation," wasn't the real motivator.
Maybe not, but callously declaring your retreat for "all women" and "inclusive" while ignoring women of color certainly is. It sends the message that they aren't really women, aren't really people worth consideration. That's a classic white supremacist thought pattern and "her lameness [in response] is representative of the genteel femininity romanticized since plantations were in full swing." So much for ancient history.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131221195506/http:/…
The website changed their wording. The link is to an archived version of the original page.
Who's a "compliant" slave? A slave who has resigned to his fate that he could never escape slavery?
True that Nathan. & those capitalists who owned Nottoway today are statists, they donate money to politicians to oppress gays & women.