What’s Woke LSU Is Doing With Your Tax Dollars? Obsessing About Plantations!

A press release that popped out this morning from Woke LSU’s journalism school: tomorrow LSU is hosting a symposium on how plantations were terrible and it’s worse that people insufficiently believe they were terrible…

The Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication will host the season five opener of Racism: Dismantling the System, “Narrative Shifting: Centering the Humanity of the Enslaved on Plantations” on Sept. 13 at 3:30 p.m. CT. The discussion will explore how plantations have historically presented the story of slavery and solutions to change these distorted narratives.

Louisiana is home to some of the grandest and most notable plantation homes in the United States. However, these estates have historically misrepresented and whitewashed the legacy of slavery and repositioned these locales of atrocities as wedding and party venues. The upcoming installment will tell the true story of plantations and examine the responsibility of plantations to change the narrative to accurately honor the millions of enslaved peoples whose lives and legacies are irrevocably tied to these places.

The event will be in person at the Whitney Plantation, the only museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the lives of enslaved people. Joy Banner, Ph.D., director of communications at Whitney Plantation, played a pivotal role in cultivating the partnership between the museum and series partners. Through her work, she strives to shed light on the true history of the plantation.

“The history of plantations is too often watered down to hide the past. That’s why we focus on centering the stories and humanness of the enslaved people who endured countless atrocities on these lands to tell the story of the Whitney Plantation,” Banner said. “We’re pleased to be a part of a conversation that addresses the true nature of plantation estates, instead of the idyllic and inaccurate portrayals we often see.”

And there’s this, in case you’re wondering what’s going on: “The Racism: Dismantling the System series is a partnership with Southern University and A&M College’s Nelson Mandela College of Government and Social Sciences, Loyola University New Orleans, Louisiana Budget Project, NAACP Louisiana State Conference and the LSU Office of Diversity & Inclusion.”

So a smorgasbord of woke grievance on display.

Given the collapsing state of legacy media in Louisiana, in which independently-owned outlets are hanging on by a thread, the one newspaper which dominates the two major markets in the state is almost defunct from the standpoint of public credibility and worthy reportage is all but gone, it would seem like LSU’s journalism school would be laser-focused on trying to redevelop the media space in the state as a viable industry.

In other words, doing a service for the paying customers who fork over tuition in order to learn how to be journalists for thriving media companies in Louisiana.

You’d think that, and you’d be wrong. Instead, we’re now in the fifth year of Woke LSU’s J-school putting on bitch-sessions about how awful Louisiana’s history is because it’s raaaaaaaacist, and they’re now so out of material that tomorrow they’re going to gather for a Two Hours’ Hate session on plantation houses and how they’re terrible symbols.

Because Whitney Plantation has been turned into a slavery museum, you know. A rich old leftist trial lawyer bought the place and decided he’d run a non-profit scam by making it a museum out in the middle of nowhere nobody goes to, and it’s been a thing ever since that these people have to pick at that scab again and again with events like the one tomorrow.

Which is then going to result in lunatics showing up at Houmas House or Oak Alley or Nottoway and busting up wedding receptions or other events, and trashing the legitimate businesses of modern-day people making a living there. You can’t have a nice wedding, say the woke, because your reception hall was a mean place 175 years ago.

This is precisely what tomorrow’s bitch-fest is intended to lead to. Don’t doubt us on this.

Were plantations cruel, awful places where slaves broke their backs bringing in crops for owners who sat on porches drinking mint juleps? Sort of. What you won’t hear in symposia like this one is that 19th century living for basically everyone in Louisiana was hellish in ways the pampered woke academics who’ll prattle about “systemic racism” could never stand.

The richest plantation owner in Louisiana didn’t have air conditioning, a car, a cell phone, cable TV or iTunes. Entertainment came from a piano or a book read by candlelight. You had to actually physically talk to people. And by sundown even the rich were usually so exhausted there wasn’t a lot they’d want to do.

Rich people were a lot shorter and skinnier than poor people are now. A six-foot, 200-pound man was a giant. The plantation owner was very often out in the fields picking cotton or baling hay with the slaves.

There were very few machines of any kind. There was no electricity. Things poor people don’t think twice about doing today were major accomplishments back then – laundry, which had to be done by hand, cooking, which was done over a fire or a wood stove, cleaning, which was intensive physical labor, drawing water from a well and then carrying it into a house…the labor that it took just to live even remotely like we do today is something nobody in the 21st century can contemplate.

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Go live in a cabin in the woods and even then you’re going to have infinitely more creature comforts than the vast majority of the plantation owners had.

And we’re going to screech forever about the injustice of these people?

This post isn’t going to defend slavery. We know slavery was and is a great injustice. But slavery was ubiquitous across the globe. It was practiced in every society everywhere – until the industrial revolution, which was a product of Enlightenment thought and the free-market capitalism that it set loose came on the scene and began creating those advances and comforts we now take for granted.

What these woke clowns will spend the day complaining about was a society which had none of those things. It employed slaves to produce agricultural goods which were the only path to wealth creation at the time, because it had no other means to produce them. Yes, sugar and cotton were lucrative crops for those people who could command enough labor to harvest them, but the wealth they produced kept alive the people who comprised that labor.

There were lots of people who didn’t have plantations back then, you know. Less than five percent of the people in the South had slaves. And, particularly in the country, the houses they lived in were no better than what slaves on the plantation had. Their clothes were no better. Their food was no better.

And nobody holds symposia on the awful lives of the free people, white and black, in the South prior to the Civil War.

Woke LSU says we need to “change the narrative.” But the woke narrative hasn’t changed in forever. It wants to push “white privilege” and presentism on an era of our history none of its promoters have the slightest understanding of.

And they call this education. And they spend our money on it.

Maybe one day Louisiana’s legislature will insist on cracking open LSU’s books to see just what we’re spending on these woke indoctrination events. It would be interesting to know where our money is going.

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