Brandi and I spent the weekend in Charleston, South Carolina, with her father recently. It’s a lovely city with an obviosly long history. Rainbow Row made us wish we could afford a home there. Well, except for the inevitable hurricanes.

We also visited Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. I’ve never been to a real Southern plantation before and wasn’t disappointed. It had the requisite lovely gardens, impressively large house, and it even had a swamp replete with alligators. The most interesting part, however, was the ’slave talk’. It was really educational. Now I understand why some Southerners aren’t ashamed of the Civil War. It seems the prerogative of the Plantation is that slaves were damned lucky to be so well provisioned and looked after. Slavery was, according to them, a fine lifestyle choice that many white Southerners were jealous of. If only the whites could live as well as slaves, they said! Indeed!

I wanted to smack the orator in the face. I wanted to jump up and scream. Really, I wanted a refund so as not to support that revisionist, racist monstrosity with a single penny of my money. I was left wondering, though, if they feel funny talking that crap in front of black people. Simply amazing! Of course, they also kindly pointed out that Harriet Beecher Stow picked the worst possible example and that she was a Yankee just trying to cause trouble. (!) They also trotted out the tired old refrain about the North instigating a war for economic reasons and abolition being a real burden to blacks. Thanks for the education, racists!

All in all, we really liked Charleston. After my rage turned to nausea, we all had a really nice time. I’d like to pretend that I believe South Carolina hasn’t institutionalized racist propaganda, but it’s hard in light of the evidence. In fact, they were flying the flag over the statehouse as late as 2000. Or, perhaps the confederate flag really is a noble symbol of blah blah blah. Treasonous, seditious, and racist. Whoa. Angry again!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Brandi, Family, Play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.