A couple notes:
- BIG CONTENT WARNING: This story discusses racial violence and terror, from slavery to the present.
- I wrote this a couple months ago when we were still on our trip. We are no longer traveling.
Part 1: Whitney Plantation, Wallace, Louisiana
The haunting question that white people like me ask ourselves when faced with the honest roots of white supremacy and violence in this country: What would I have done?
Would I have fought against slavery? Been part of the Underground Railroad? Would I have been like most white people (then, later, and now) and stayed silent? And the most terrible of wonderings: Would I have taken part in or encouraged racial terror or violence during or post-slavery?
We were faced with these questions and a stark reminder of the horrors of slavery when we visited the immensely powerful Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana.
Very few white people actually owned slaves — about 1% according to our tour guide, which makes sense knowing what we know about the 1%, doesn’t it? In many chilling ways, nothing has changed in the last 200 years.
For me there was a brief comfort in this statistic. Well at least I wouldn’t have owned slaves. We white people are always looking to be comforted…
