There Are No Girls on the Internet - Don't Have a Wedding on a Plantation

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

Jade Magnus Ogunnaike from the Color of Change explains their work to get major wedding websites like Zola and Pinterest to change how they deal with plantations as wedding venues.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a woman of a certain age, I've gotten to my fair share of weddings over the years. I'm also getting married myself. Or at least I was until COVID, and now, who even knows. But that means I have seen no fewer than a dozen wedding websites

listing outdated wedding cliches to avoid. Things like serving drinks in mason jars, which I'm sorry to say, I still think is kind of charming. A survey of 5,000 married adults by the wedding inbox found that certain old-fashioned wedding traditions are now falling out of favor in our evolving world. Take the expectation that a bride's dad will always pick up the tab. Not only is this totally heteronormative,

but it's also a norm that a lot of people do not stick to anymore. Today, more than four out of ten couples share the cost of weddings between both families, and take throwing rice at the happy couple after the ceremony. Even though Snopes found the whole birds eat rice and die thing as a myth, rice can be annoying to clean up, so now many couples have turned to alternatives like blowing blood. So just like anything else, wedding traditions evolved over the years, which brings me to one wedding element that definitely needs to be left in the past, and that is the plantation wedding.

I know what you might be thinking. Who would actually want to have a wedding on a plantation, a site of brutalization and torture of black enslaved people? But I'm from the South, and I can tell you it happens. A-list celebrities, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, had their 2012 wedding at Boone Plantation in South Carolina, the filming location for the film The Notebook. It was also the site where, according to one record, 85 enslaved black people were brutalized while being forced to harvest cotton, pecans,

and producing brick. Here's an upbeat tour video from the website, Southern Weekend. It also has breathtaking grounds, which are a popular wedding venue, and it features a truly spectacular home built in the 1930s. I mean, they could have at least put the music in a minor key, right?

Now, at the time, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, their wedding got so much positive press for being romantic and beautiful. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds married where the notebook was filmed, Us Magazine gushed. People magazine's headline added that the couple tied the knot in a super romantic location. But now, the couple regrets it.

They've since had another ceremony and donated money to the NACP. It's impossible to reconcile. What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw, was a place built on devastating tragedy, Ryan Reynolds said in an interview. It's no surprise the couples

say they fell in love with the venue on Pinterest. For most people, the first step in planning a wedding is searching websites like Pinterest, Zola, and Wedding Wire. And up until last year, these sites allowed plantations to be advertised on their platforms as charming and nostalgic landmarks of a genteel bygone era, instead of somber reminders of the brutality of slavery. That is, until the civil rights organization

color of change stepped in. They worked with popular wedding platforms like Pinterest, The Not, and Wedding Wire, to develop new guidelines to stop the promotion of wedding content that romanticizes former slave plantations. And this fits squarely within color of change's understanding that part of making change involves sparking cultural shifts in people's minds. In this case, getting them to stop thinking about slavery from a white-centered lens. It's work that Jade has spent her entire young adult life getting ready for.

My name is Jade Magnus Ogunaki. I'm the senior director of the media culture and economic justice team at Color of Change. So how does one get a job that involves getting wedding websites to rethink plantations? First, I went to Howard University, which is, you know, sort of like hotbed for discussions around political activism and black identity. I went to Howard. And, you know, I was at Howard during what I call, like, the black youth movement of the 2010. You know, this is when Trayvon Martin was killed. It was such a big turning point for so many of us.

And this is when you have organizations like B.YP. 100 and Dream Defenders coming to the forefront. And so I was a founding member of BYP 100. I think I joined when I was a junior in college or maybe the summer between my junior and senior year. And immediately after I wanted to get an organizing job. And, you know, quite a few people that I respected had worked in the same. the labor movement. And so I went to go work in labor, organizing low-wage workers for two years, which was, you know, the best sort of education that you can get in the strongest organizing training possible. And, you know, I was getting married at the end of those two years. And with

labor, you're required to do such a lot of travel. And so I was looking for a job that didn't require as much travel. I had a friend who worked at Color of Change. They had a friend. They happened to be sort of interviewing at the same time I was looking for a job and it fell into place. I started entry local at Color of Change four years ago as a campaign manager and I've been here ever since. So you mentioned getting married earlier. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you. I happened to know from social media that you had a big, beautiful wedding not that long ago. Congratulations. Did you use wedding planning websites like Zola and Pinterest and what was experience like for you planning your wedding? I got engaged and married actually quite young for the

current modern era that we're in now. And so yeah, I was totally overwhelmed. You know, first of all, it was quite, you know, I didn't have a lot of money when I was planning my wedding. And so, you know, you're looking at all of these wedding websites, buying all the magazines, listening to all the podcast, you know, about how to plan a wedding. And, you know, actually during this, sort of wedding planning was the first time I'd ever heard of a plantation wedding. I'm from Los Angeles. We don't have relics to American slavery in the same way that you may have in like the South or the East. And I went to college in D.C. So, you know, they're not a ton of plantations in D.C. Although there are some in, you know, the sort of broader DMV area. Yeah, that was sort of

the first time I had ever kind of seen the plantation weddings thing. And I thought it was just, you know, above all, super duper weird. But I know now that it's sort of like a, it's a cultural touchstone for a lot of people in the South. Yeah, I grew up in the South. I'm from Virginia and I've never attended a wedding on a plantation, but I've definitely been invited to them. I do think there's this sort of unstated norm that like, you know, if you're from the South, what, like, it's a thing that happens. I think that people don't really question it that much. It's just kind of becomes part of Southern culture, and it becomes one of those things that people don't kind of make themselves ask any kind of critical questions about or be critical of because it's just part

of being raised in the South. It shouldn't be terribly surprising that when some people think of plantations, they think of romantic treeline paths, elegant porches, and, hey, this would be a great place for a wedding. We've removed these sites so far from their actual histories and the legacies of the enslaved people who lived and died there. And a lot of people in the South grow up not really thinking critically about the legacy of slavery and the way it's built into the landscape in the South. Visiting my parents in Virginia involves a drive down a highway still named after Jefferson Davis,

the former president of the Confederacy. And to get to my high school, I drove down Monument Avenue every single day, lined with statues of Confederate soldiers like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. And I never even really stopped to think about it until I was an adult. I learned about a sanitized, friendly version of slavery and the Civil War, and I'm not kidding, our elementary school even had Civil War Day every year, where all the kids would either dress up as Confederate or Union soldiers and recreate a march on the schoolyard. Now, Jay grew up across the country in California, and she grew up learning about the missions.

Outposts built by Spain and California in the late 1700s, where indigenous people were forcibly relocated from their traditional homes in the name of colonialism and Christianity. In California, we have like missions, which were essentially like torture sites for Native American indigenous people, right? And like in school, you go and visit the missions. In third grade in Los Angeles Unified School District, you build a mission, right? So there are all of these sorts of ways that human atrocities, like slavery are sort of built into our culture, built into our psyche. And, you know, they're so normalized that it's, you know, you don't think about it at all because it's just something you've grown. up with. Yeah, it's really, really interesting. So tell me more about how the idea to get wedding

websites to stop romanticizing plantations became a reality. Yeah, so I had just come back, I had a baby in what years at 2019, and so just come back from maternity leave and was talking to some colleagues. One of our researchers, Isha Raminujan, you know, was talking about, had shared an article, I think, about plantation weddings. And so she was, you know, she was like, you know, what if we targeted, you know, obviously this is something that's not right. You know, what if we targeted wedding planners? And so, you know, thinking about like sort of the strategy or, you know, for like how we can like really affect change, right? It's like we could target wedding planners.

But there's not necessarily like a wedding planners association, you know, that's like mandatory for wedding planners to. you know, be a part of in order to plan weddings. From my own experience planning a wedding, I knew that sort of like the big engines in wedding wedding planning were these like platforms. A lot of them started as magazines, print publications and then transitioned to to online, digital publications. And so I sort of, I knew already, you know, the big ones. I knew the not. I knew wedding wire. I knew Zola, who had, you know, begun doing this, like, um, uh, quite visible publicity campaign on the New York subway at the exact same time as this is happening about how they're sort of like a non-traditional modern wedding platform. Um, Martha Stewart's weddings,

brides. And so I was like, I love the idea around plantation weddings, especially because this is something that, you know, we talk about in black community all the time. I'm sure if you search plantation weddings, you know, on Twitter for the past 10 years, there's been sort of like cyclical conversations about them. Like, how crazy is this? Why is this a lot? Et cetera. And so I was like, I brought together,

Isha and I brought together our campaign manager at the time, Amani Brown, and was like, let's sit down and let's target these wedding website platforms. They are the ones to go after because they are the ones, you know, curating this vision and this aesthetic around what a wedding should be. Implantations are largely a really, really big part of that aesthetic. And, you know, the more we sort of went into the reason, research, you know, the darker it kind of became. So yeah, that's sort of how it got started.

We, you know, what we, we sent out letters to all of the platforms I just named. Two of them got back to us, the knot in wedding wire and Pinterest. And so, you know, I think the first meeting we had was with Pinterest with Ifoma Zilma, who was an incredible, she used to be at Pinterest and, you know, they treated her and other black employees really poorly. And, you know, she left a publicly this year. And Ifomo, you know, was just such a champion of this cause, you know, she was like, as a black woman, I, you know, it's not just about my job. It's about like what is important for my reputation and ethics.

And I, this is not okay. It's not okay that we push this sort of plantation aesthetic on the platform. And so what they did was they removed keywords. You were unable to search a list of plantation related keywords. And then we met with this. and not in Wedding Wire, and, you know, that was a longer set of conversations. But, you know, we also came to sort of an agreement, which we developed some guidelines around what was able to be put on the website.

So, you know, they agree to no longer feature, you know, they'll do like listicles or features of weddings. They would no longer do original content featuring Plantation Weddings, which I thought was, you know, a big deal. And the second piece that they did, which I thought was really, really important was they had a team who went through the directory and sort of cold descriptions. You know, they removed words like antebellum. They removed words that sort of played on the history of slavery.

You know, they're probably the most disturbing part of this whole thing is that what we found was that it's not only that slavery was a part. of this sort of project, right? It's like in some of the cabins, they would advertise slave cabins that had been there since the 1700s. And to me, I'm just like, so why on earth would you wanna get married, you know,

next to places where people were beaten and abused and tortured or enslaved and sexually assaulted? Jade's team found that wedding websites use terms like romantic, charming, and elegant to describe plantations. But obviously, any romanticization of plantation life is just artifice to make it seem more charming and less like a torture site.

And even weirder, like a copy of something that never really existed in the first place, some wedding venues in the South were built well after slavery ended, but were designed to look like plantations and call themselves plantations, even though they were never actually working plantations. What do you gain from calling your wedding venue that never housed enslaved people a plantation? And what exactly are you trying to capitalize on by using that, that word to sell your venue to prospective couples. Bobby Asaro owns Southern Oaks Plantation in New Orleans East.

It has never been a real plantation built only in the 60s to look like one. The lighting, the pillows, the sofas, we did all of that to give it a more updated look. It just goes to show how deeply the marketing around the fantasy of plantations and slavery as symbols of nostalgia and elegance is intertwined with the American South. what we found was there were quite a few venues who actually had never taken part. There had never been enslaved people on the grounds, but they were also marketing this plantation fantasy, which, you know, I hadn't realized was such a big part of so many American psyche. And it's this idea that, you know, in the antebellum south before the Civil War, when black people were enslaved,

this was a great time of gentility and grace, right? And so that is the aesthetic that these wedding website platforms were playing on and that, you know, so many people plan weddings around. For me, when I hear about, you know, pre-Civil War, I think of pain, I think of rape, I think of abuse, I think of torture. But for a lot of people, that's not what they think of. They think of a better time. And so that part and that piece was, you know, it was quite jarring to realize that, you know, a lot of what these plantations were doing was they were marketing. slavery as sort of a draw for a romantic place to get married. Immediately after, you know, we had an exclusive with BuzzFeed that came out around

the knot and wedding wire and Pinterest, you know, making these big changes. What had been so interesting was that, you know, we sent, when we initially sent a letter to Zola, for example, we had sent a list of examples. And so I had just happened to be checking up on the website, you know, just one evening and went to Zola's website. and they had pulled all of the mentions of plantations from the website. But they hadn't replied to us at all. And, you know, that was a problem for a couple of reasons.

The number one being is that we're actually not interested at color of change and people sort of just like pulling things and, you know, doing like quick fixes. We want people to make commitments and change policies and rules moving forward. So, yeah, it's great that you couldn't search plantation at the time that I was on Zola's website. But the problem actually is that, you know, there's no, policy around it moving forward. So if someone puts, if a plantation venue put something up the next day, it could be featured. And as I said earlier, I was taking the subway to work every day and noticing that Zola had all of these ads about how they were so progressive and modern and a,

you know, a wedding platform for a new sort of partners. And yet they were totally, you know, they were totally unwilling to make, you know, they were unwilling to respond to us and make these sort of policy changes, which is just, you know, a way that things are just. you know, companies are so incongruent in marketing and the actual policies that they enact. And so when the BuzzFeed article came out, Zola said, yes, we're not taking anything down. You know, we're not making any policies. You know, we agree that this is, you know, we agree that people should be able to put up whatever they want.

A couple hours later than New York Times did an article around it. And in that few hours, Zola made a commitment in the New York Times article to no longer feature them. So, you know, that was sort of a full circle moment. Brides and Martha Stewart's weddings also. made these commitments as well to, you know, when the articles came out to no longer future plantation weddings content. So that was a big deal, you know, it was a really meaningful moment. It's interesting to see that it took that kind of high profile public pressure that originally they were sort of not responsive, but when the New York Times writes about it, they seem to have

changed their tune pretty quickly. You know, it just shows, you know, what we've seen, I think even since the George Floyd protest, is that outward communications are one thing, what a corporation puts out to the world is one thing, and what they do behind the scenes with their own employees, with the content that they push out is a totally different thing. You know, we saw so many corporations, you know, Color of Change also has this sort of campaign hub called Beyond the Statement,

which is about how we've seen so many corporations say, oh, black lives matter, right? But, you know, when you look at their companies, they're paying their low-wage workers who are disproportionately black, you know, $10 an hour. It just doesn't add up, you know. And so for, you know, the plantation, weddings content as well as this beyond the statement stuff, it's important that black people matter

in life as much as they matter in death. It's important that our ancestors, the pain and the torture that they went through is respected. And that was a big piece of this plantation wedding campaign, is that these are sacred sites. These are sites where human atrocities took place. planting more trees and, you know, pointing to the beautiful architecture does not change the fact that these are places. There's not like slavery just happened there. They have the plantations were built to house slavery. You know, it's very intentional what was happening. Let's take a quick break.

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. And we're back. Wedding websites not romanticizing plantations may seem like a small change. But sometimes a small concrete action can lead to a wider, more meaningful cultural shift. and individual people's attitudes. And even if you've never really thought about why having a wedding on a plantation isn't a great idea, platforms like Pinterest not romanticizing plantation weddings

can create a larger shift and how everyone thinks about slavery and the way it shows up in our culture. This is not new work for color of change. In addition to more traditional activism around social change, they also work to create change using popular culture. In the wake of protests around police killings, for instance, they work to have television shows

that glorify policing as an issue. entertainment device like cops and live PD taken off the air. You mentioned some of the other work that Color of Change is involved in. And I like that in addition to sort of some of the more traditional things that we think of in terms of demanding accountability, Color of Change also tries to create change through leading on these cultural things. So, you know, like the plantation weddings, I guess why is that so important in conjunction with some of the more traditional ways that you might think of as getting justice, also pushing

forward these cultural changes and getting people to sort of rethink their own attitudes around how they understand and, you know, deal with black folks. Yeah, you know, culture is a really, really big piece of color changes with work. It always has been, you know, from us sort of like getting Glenn Beck, getting Glenn Beck show advertisers to pull out years ago to, you know, our work this year to get cops and live PD off the air. The culture, culture work is really important. And, you know, black people, we are, you know, the culture creators in this country, right? And I, you know, I really view our culture work as, like, not only uplifting and centering

and claiming black culture, which we do through a lot in our, like, Hollywood work and our storytelling work. But it's also about supplanting, like, the white-centered cultural symbols that really harm us, you know? I'm sure so many of, you know, this, like, plantation weddings thing leads. into such a larger problem, right? Which is the way that slavery is taught in schools and the ways that people think about it.

I mean, we had a few years ago a textbook company, you know, put out a textbook that said slavery was essentially like compared it to being an intern, right? And so because the true story of slavery has been neutralized in so many ways, you know, I think if people were really new in detail the sort of things that happened on plantations outside of like, you know, maybe viewing 12 years a slave, you know, or seeing glory,

I think they would really think twice about revering these sorts of symbols, you know. Yeah, the cultural work is incredibly important because culture shapes policy, right? And, you know, we see the movement of the past 10 years, you know, as I said, the black youth movement. we see how over time, you know, black organizers and black groups shifted the culture where, you know, it is no longer controversial to say Black Lives Matter, right? You couldn't say that, though, in 2013. It was quite a controversial thing to say. And so we see that culture like, you know, primes the environment for, you know, the policies and changes that need to happen. And, you know, culture where, you know, culture, where, you know, is also, it's important and, you know, the work that affects material conditions also matters a whole lot too. And what I love about COC is it's not one or the other. We're definitely concerned with both and moving campaigns on both, in both areas. Definitely. Do you feel that the

work that you did, getting these wedding websites to change the way they talk about slavery, was a successful example of that kind of cultural shift that you're describing? Yeah. And I, you know, think it's also what's so important about having, you know, black leaders, you know, at a powerful organization, you know, black organizations really matter. And this is something that we took up because we knew how important it was. We, you know, so many of us maybe have been invited to a wedding or, you know, or been on a plantation tour as a child, you know, in school and sort of felt deeply uncomfortable out the ways that our ancestors

were disrespected and the pain and the torture that they went through was not respected. And so, yeah, I think it was an incredibly meaningful moment. Did the websites

who changed their policies around plantations face any kind of criticism or blowback? One of the most interesting things, honestly, that I found was that, you know, there was quite a bit,

you know, I think a lot of people love to play the devil's advocate and sort of comments on articles and things. But when we were talking to the Not in Wedding Wire, the following, January. This all happened in November. So talking to them the following January, I asked, have you,

have you all received any, like, blowback or criticism? They said none at all, right? So this, none. No one has said anything wrong. We haven't had our inbox, you know, no one's anything in our inbox. It has been a decision that people, like, totally agree, makes sense. And so for me, that was such, like, a validating moment, you know, for a lot of corporations don't, you know, they make or don't make decisions based on perceived, what will people say, right? And, you know, they have this idea in their mind, sort of the same way that, you know, candidates for office had this idea in their mind of like the standard American, right, which is, you know, an extremely white conservative person. When the truth of the matter is that, you know, people have diversity

of thought the past 10 years has shifted the way that people think around issues of justice, in such a large way that, you know, this was sort of a needed next step more than, you know, an earth-shaking, you know, Brown versus Board of Education decision. So I read a lot of angry comments saying that you all were trying to have plantations destroyed or burn down or closed. And there's really no truth in that. Literally, we never said that, you know, like, that to me was the most shocking thing. I'm like, oh, my gosh.

Like, we literally didn't say anything to plantations at all. We're not trying to, you know, what we have found. through talking to quite a few black historians and curators who actually work on these plantations is what we really need is for federal and state governments to invest money in these plantations and keep them as like museums, right? They need to be designated as historical places and places of note, and so they can get funding so that they can be kept open. What we want is for people to hear the actual history of what happened.

What we don't want is someone dancing a baby got back, on the grave of it. It's like, you know, that's what we don't want. But we want these, we want plantations to stay open as, as memorials to the pain and suffering that the American people and the American government put black Americans. That is what we want. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Bowdenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

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This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines.

We go straight to the source, the athletes themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context,

and ask the questions everybody wants to. answer. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slic Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going.

From the WNBA standout, Kate Martin and rising hockey star, Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.

An Olympic champs, Gabby Thomas, and Katie Ladeke. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win. more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can, like, I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Let's get right back to it. So how should we think about plantations still standing today. Jade says part of the process involves reimagining our current understanding of how plantations are used and the role they should play in our culture going forward. And some plantations are doing that kind of work already. At Bell Mead Plantation in Nashville, tour guide Bridget Jones realized the tour focused mostly on wineries and the lavish weddings that took place there. So she left her job, went to grad school to get a master's degree, and became the plantation's first ever director of African-American studies.

She now works to uncover never-before-seen histories of the plantation and incorporates them into the plantation's tours. 400 years by working here. Once I got promoted, I was like, this is the moment for the narrative of slaves to really come to the forefront. Now, in absence of the kind of government funding

Jade was describing earlier, a few plantations still need to do weddings and events to make money to fund the kind of curation work that Bridget Jones does at Belmont. There are a lot of black historians on plantations who are doing really, really incredible work. But what we, like I said, what we found from talking to them is that in order to pay their salaries a lot of the time, the plantations do have to be open for events, right? And so I will say that's in the minority, right?

Like not every plantation is trying to do this, like, you know, incredible truth-telling history. That's not the reality for most of them. but there are a few where black historians and curators are on the premises, and in order to sort of keep the plantation open for to tell this true history, they do need to have weddings in order to bring an income. And this is why reimagining the role that plantations play in our culture is so important. Right now, plantations sanitize, or at least compartmentalize, the history of what actually happened on plantations in order to appeal to couples

looking for a romantic wedding venue. And for a small number of those plantations like Belmead, that money goes into paying for curation that tells the truth about slavery. But if we were able to designate and preserve plantations as historical landmarks, they'd be funded as such, which means they wouldn't need to rely on sanitizing

the legacy of slavery and the literal song of dance of the wedding industry to stay open. We could have a real chance at using plantations to properly educate people about and memorialize slavery. The Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana is the only plantation in the state

with an exclusive focus on the lives of enslaved people. Here's their current founder, John Cummings. We can't rewrite history, but we can correct some of the evils of history. And the number one tool that we have is education. They went viral this summer for a social media post explaining why they would never hold a wedding, writing, our tour has always focused on the brutal labor and stolen freedom of those that created

vast economic wealth for the enslaving families. We do not glamorize the big house or the grounds. In addition to our mission to educate visitors and the larger community about slavery and its legacies, this is a site of memory and reverence. So what if that was the popular understanding of the role of plantations in today's culture? Not whitewashing them and selling them as romantic sites of a bygone era for happy couples. but an actual place to memorialize and come to terms with the true legacy of slavery. Until then, something we can all do right now is spend time reflecting critically about the ways the legacy of slavery shows up in our culture and our lives.

We saw a very famous couple, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. They had a wedding on a plantation. They later apologized for it and donated money to, I think, the NACP and had a different, smaller ceremony later on. What do you say to someone who maybe had a plantation wedding Maybe they didn't think about the implications of doing it. What is your, like, how should they be thinking about their wedding going forward? Or what would you tell them? Well, first of all, the thing that's so strange about the Blakely of your Brian Reynolds thing is he's Canadian and she's from L.A.

So really confused about like why they want to have a wedding on a plantation. It's not a cultural touchstone for either of them. That thing, that piece has always really kind of disturbed me. Like, neither of them have ties, you know, to plantations. So I thought that was really weird. You know, I think reflecting on the experience and taking something away from it is enough. You know, I don't think they need to renounce their wedding or burn the photo books, right? But I think in general, transformative reflection can be really, really transformative.

And I think undergoing that process is important. I'm not going to say, oh, now make a donation, a color or change. because you had a wedding on a plantation. I mean, it would be nice. But, you know, that's not what we're looking for. We're looking, you know, we're looking for people to really look deeply and look inward about the ways that they have, you know, perpetuated the legacy of slavery, you know, and that is one way, but there are plenty of other ways. You know, maybe you go to, maybe your kid goes to a high school where they sing Dixie, you know, like these are the things to be reflecting on and looking for other ways that the legacy of slavery shows.

up in your life in ways that may not be respectful or reverendial. When Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds first spoke out about their wedding with regret, I have to admit I was a little skeptical. How could they only now be realizing this wasn't a respectful thing to do, I wondered? But honestly, it's never too late for anyone to start thinking critically about the role slavery plays in our culture and history. Maybe as individuals, we can't turn every still-standing plantation into a site for respectful education about slavery.

But we can work to unpack our own roles in honoring the legacy of enslaved people that our country was built on. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangooty.com.

There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band, with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness

from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was harmed.

You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come in to, he's like, you know, I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Ashanti Plummer from Fudderound and Find Out. This week, AZ Fud and I sat down with Step and Curry. Step talks pressure, confidence, and what it really takes to stay great. There's different categories, I guess, so I'm like conditioning, shooting drills, where you try to simulate kind of games. Look at her face. We have a love-hate relationship with those because you know you're getting something out of it.

You don't look forward to those days. Listen to butt around and find out on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.