Okay, so I wanted to weigh in on the whole “white people trashing Plantation Home tours” story.

As you all know, I’m Canadian. I’ve been living in the American South for about the last 11 years. In the history classes I took in school I think we spent exactly one day discussing the American Civil War. Since arriving in the South, I have taken it upon myself to study the war in much greater detail as the history of this region and the war itself still resonate with how things are here today.

There are still places in most deep south states that black people know to stay away from.

I’ve been on a few Plantation Home tours and have found them be both enlightening and emotionally challenging. There’s a lot of times history isn’t pretty. Instead of trying to pretend like it never happened or that it happened very differently from what the record indicates, we need to face the truth and understand that white slave owners in the South did some pretty despicable things.

On one of the tours, I walked out a set of double doors that led to a huge balcony at the rear of the house. Beyond the balcony were the fields where the slaves used to toil. As the guide told us about what life was like for them, I pictured the field full of slaves, working away, and white masters beating and whipping and screaming at them. It almost made my stomach turn, but that’s what SLAVERY WAS LIKE.

I imagined all the people who died in those fields, never having an opportunity to live free or make use of talents they may have had. I thought about the female slaves who had to endure daily rapes and assaults. I thought about slave owners selling slaves among each other, like my friends and I do with video games. My heart broke for all of it.

There is, admittedly, a certain romanticism that has come to be associated with these homes. A couple of friends of mine got engaged in front of a Plantation Home a couple of years ago and there are number of them that are popular wedding venues.

I won’t deny the homes themselves are often quite nice and opulent, but that’s only so because of the hard, unrewarded work of thousands and thousands of slaves. And it’s a remarkable contrast too: From the roomy, elegant, well furnished rooms of the main house to cramped, cold and almost windowless slave quarters. This was the reality of slavery of the American South.

If that makes you, as a white person, feel bad, IT FUCKING SHOULD. Not that any of us folk around today were personally responsible for what happened at those Plantations, but I guarantee you most of us have ancestors who were.

It might be an inconvenient truth, but it IS the truth.