Now that Aunt Jemima and the Washington Redskins have announced plans to change their troubled names, is it time to take another look at brands and institutions that incorporate the word plantation?
Plantation brand blackstrap molasses, distributed by Allied Old English, Inc., of Port Reading, New Jersey
That’s the subject of my new Visual Thesaurus column, which ranges from Rhode Island to Florida to Texas and from dog food to rum to window shutters. Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s a preview:
In the 1950s, among African Americans in particular, plantation began to take on the metaphorical sense of “any institution regarded as exploitative or paternalistic.” In his Autobiography, published in 1989, the musician Miles Davis wrote: “All the record companies were interested in at the time was making a lot of money and keeping their so-called black stars on the music plantation so that their white stars could just rip us off.” Commenting on the National Football League’s 2018 decision to fine players who didn’t stand for the National Anthem, the African American sociologist Harry Edwards told an interviewer: “This land is not free. My people are not free. It’s a carryover from 400 years of slavery and oppression. [NFL team] owners are acting like plantation owners, insisting that any act of ‘rebellion’ must be squelched.”
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Blog bonus! As I note in the column, plantation can have a neutral meaning: “the act of planting.” It’s also pretty innocent in the song “Dalmatian Plantation,” by Mel Leven, sung at the end of the 1961 Disney animated movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians. This “plantation” is a haven, not a bastion of Cruella-ty. And, of course, it rhyme with “dalmation.”
We'll have a dalmatian plantation
Where our population can roam
In this new location
Our whole aggregation
Will love our plantation home.
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