Bolding mine.
Please take a really good look at what you’ve written here. Turn it over a couple of times, consider it from other angles. I’m guessing that as a member of this community, you share the deep well of empathy that most good horsepeople have. It is not shining through in this comment.
“Better to Remain Silent and Be Thought a Fool than to Speak and Remove All Doubt:”
Who exactly was feeling deep pain and oppression about the name of this event? EN admits to never actually speaking to any eventing people of color about their feelings. They admit there has never been any history of slavery on this location which is actually named after the pine trees. In this connotation the world Plantation has no relevance with the slave history of southern cotton plantations. The area is largely Quaker, and the Quakers believed it was their biblical duty to help slaves.
I don’t feel like the reaction from the land owner was the right one, but I understand how they feel. They were attacked, aggressively, and feel like they’ve done a lot for the sport of eventing. Perhaps there was a gentler way of going about this?
We’ve lost one of our best events in the country.
I do not feel like EN was ever interested in a “open discussion” and blaming the land owner is ridiculous. EN can’t control the click bait responders they generated and it was these attacks from random strangers who never even thought of being outraged until now.
Context matters. The site in question was never a slave plantation. The word plantation has multiple meanings, some of which have nothing to do with slavery.
This reminds me of the controversy that just erupted at USC over a professor who was an expert in U.S.-China relations referencing in his lecture a very common Chinese word that happens to sound like an American racial slur. (Before saying the word, he explained that the word is Chinese and its relevance to his lecture, but black students took the position he could not utter the Chinese word at all because hearing it was traumatic). https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli/index.html. USC hastily removed the professor from the class and was subsequently pilloried by mainstream media, alums, and Chinese students, who wondered if they were now required to censor their language on campus.
It is absurd to demand that everything that could possibly remind anyone of negative aspects of our history must be censored or changed. Should the fabric “cotton” be renamed because it might remind us that enslaved people were used to pick cotton?
Unfortunately, these examples of misplaced outrage serve only to alienate otherwise sympathetic and well-meaning supporters of the racial justice cause, while doing nothing to address real issues such as unequal educational opportunities, disparate sentencing, and other substantive injustices. Very sad outcome for eventers.
You know, this sport is great because of it’s diversity. All races, all genders compete on an equal basis, the only sport in the world where this happens. Why in the world EN chose this hill to die on is beyond me. We’ve lost an incredible venue, probably never to be replaced “picking a fight” as someone so appropriately called it, over what? The word ‘Plantation’? Has this been bothering everybody all these years and no one spoke up until now? Ugh. It’s heartbreaking.
I encourage everyone who says POC are not effected by this, to check out the Instagram of youngblackequestrians. Also please look at their story.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFNdAt4nv2D/?igshid=17d7utb1q778
Eventing Nation wrote a thoughtful and kind piece about the name and why it was problematic, why it didn’t represent wrongdoing by any of the people associated, but why using the word was just no longer appropriate. I applaud them for standing up and I applaud them for the way they approached it.
A large piece of land called a “plantation” in the US is irretrievably going to be associated with slavery whether that land was worked by slaves or not. Blame the slaveholders who made it so, not the people who were enslaved or the descendants of either.
Changing the name of an event is easy. Full stop. Even changing the name of an incorporated nonprofit is not really that hard. The event could change its name without changing the name of the organizing corporation or the location. (Example a certain 4* in Kentucky.) Name changes happen all the time.
At the end of the day, the organizers, and the property owner, care more about the name than they do about eventing, the people who come to their event, or people who saw the name and thought that maybe this sport wasn’t for them.
I’m sorry to lose this event. But the blame goes to the landowner and organizer.
Why keeping this name is more important to them than disassociating the event from any reference to slavery, I cannot guess.
Yes.
F*** EN! This doesn’t help. It doesn’t help at all! The divide is even greater. The opposite of what you wanted has been achieved.
Sometimes growth is painful
No one is feeling deep pain and oppression over this venue. No one. Grow up.
This is the opposite of growth. I don’t know why some (not you) feel this is a victory. Do people think this silly crap actually changes a mind set? It creates the opposite effect.
Glaccum’s letter is a temper tantrum and he should be embarrassed by it.
And on his invocation of the First Amendment, not only is he wrong constitutionally (the First Amendment doesn’t say the media has to publish anything a random private citizen wishes) but it completely undermines his other argument, that the word “plantation” is innocuous and isn’t political speech.
Honestly, pair that letter with Denis’ posts on Facebook (which I hear have all been pulled down now or put on lockdown) and it’s really no shock that he refused to change the name.
BLM is a terrorist organization. White Liberals pay Black people to loot their neighbors. Harris wants full term abortions. etc, etc
Quelle surprise. And one step further - the original choice of the name is also no shock.
I work in software, and we changed our database terminology to primary/replica a few years ago in all the code we control. Not only does it make the team more comfortable, but also, it’s a much more accurate way to describe the relationship and purpose of the servers. Our code is cleaner and easier to understand from a couple of hours of thought and a couple of hours of work. It took maybe a week to get comfortable with the new names. Now when someone uses the old terms I find those to be the wrenching and confusing ones. I’m really happy we did it.
I hear the word plantation and I immediately think of slaves.
How do you know that the name of the venue doesn’t bother any one? What type of research has been completed to show that?
Would you take your Master’s degree off the wall and refer to it in some oblique way on your resume? Or do you think it’s okay to call it a “Master’s degree” since it is not intended to reference slavery?
You have some research for this as well? You really think that the goal of Black people is to make money looting? They are unconcerned about years of systemic racism?
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