Go to theallusionist.org/actively-passive to listen to this episode and for more information about it
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, run the latest software update on language and it doesn't work now!
This episode is another instalment in the Telling Other Stories series about renaming, and in response to last episode The Box, about Erwin Schrödinger with his eponymous cat and equation, Emerson offers the following idea: "You could call Schrödinger's cat Theory simply The Milton Theory? This is because I just searched if Schrödinger ever had a cat and indeed he had one named Milton."
James asks: “If we're not referring to the quantum cat by the name of a pedophile how should we refer to Platonic ideals, solids, or loves?” I’m taking suggestions, theallusionist.org/contact - or tell me about any renamings you’ve been involved with, of such things as mountains or products or foods or streets.
This episode contains discussions of anti-Black racism, violence and sexual violence.
On with the show.
HZ: Recently I had a conversation with my parents-in-law about a foodstuff local to them: it’s a meatball made of bits of pig offal and meat scraps, and where my in-laws live in the West Midlands, the name is the same word as the F-slur used against gay men. We discussed possible replacements for the name: organballs? Offalbundles, referring to the etymology of the food’s original F-name, from a bundle of sticks? They’re called ‘ducks’ in some other areas of England, which is confusing, because they’re not made of duck - and don’t look like a duck or quack like a duck - but that’s a lesser problem than sharing a name with a slur. The foodstuff is not connected to the slur in meaning, but some words have been so wrecked by one particular use, even unrelated uses are infected. Another such word is ‘plantation’.
For many years, people have been encouraging its removal from names of products and places - with some results: in 2019 the town of Sienna Plantation in Texas became just Sienna. That same year Bigelow Tea began the process of renaming its Plantation Mint tea to Perfectly Mint, and Bigelow’s Charleston Tea Plantation to Charleston Tea Garden. In 2016, Cornell University had agreed that its Cornell Plantations would henceforth be called Cornell Botanic Gardens - the gardens had been named Plantations in 1944 not because they had been the kind of plantation tended by enslaved Africans, but because one of the founders wanted to reclaim the sense of the word that meant the act of plants being planted or an area that was being cultivated. But in 2016, Cornell conceded that that reclamation was not possible.
In 2020, many organisations suddenly realised that anti-Black racism exists, and got busy renaming. The State of Rhode Island voted just to be called that and no longer the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. And in neighbouring Massachusetts, the living museum formerly known as Plimoth Plantation became Plimoth Patuxet.
Some of the proposed plantation renamings are still in progress. The French drinks company Maison Ferrand announced in 2020 they would rename their Plantation Rum; at time of recording, they are still called Plantation Rum, but I wrote to them asking if they would speak to me about this and they replied a couple of days ago saying, "Plantation Rum is very much in the process of re-branding," and they mentioned that the new name will hopefully be announced soon. Nearly 13,000 people signed a petition to rename the town of Plantation, Florida - it’s still called Plantation, I don't know where they're at with the process. (I can guess.)
In London, Ontario, in 2019 Lyla Wheeler, then aged 9, made a petition saying: “I have been trying to have the name of my street (Plantation Road) changed for the past year. The name of my street means a place where Black slaves were forced to work, in horrible conditions and were often whipped and punished, and sometimes killed.
With everything happening in our world right now, slave language needs to be abolished. Please sign the petition and help end racist language.”
4,316 people did sign the petition. So far the street is still called Plantation Road.
There are still a lot of things with plantation in their names - products, housing developments, country clubs, shutters, towns, roads - and it’s probably going to stick around in many of them. But Kennedy Whiters has plans for the word ‘plantation’ itself.
KENNEDY WHITERS: Hi, my name is Kennedy Whiters. I am an architect, also a business owner, I own my own boutique architecture firm that specializes in historic preservation and owners’ representation, also known as construction management. I go by pronouns of she/her, and I'm also a Black woman.
HZ: Kennedy also runs unRedact the Facts, a research and advocacy project to “(un)Redact the facts of (hi)story to tell a full(er) story for racial equity + healing.”
KENNEDY WHITERS: I'm saying unredact the word ‘plantation’. There are many definitions for a plantation, but the southern definition of plantation, it's where people laboured during the period of chattel slavery. Plantations were places of forced labour. They were forced labour camps - and other people are using this phrase to describe these places.
I made an attempt on Wikipedia to add the descriptor 'forced labour camp' to the word ‘plantation’ - and someone redacted my unredaction, actually.
HZ: I imagine fewer people would choose to have weddings at things called forced labour camps. You would hope.
KENNEDY WHITERS: I would hope. ‘Antebellum’ and ‘plantation’ seemed to glorify this period of time that was very horrific. It's a period of enslavement. It's a period of trauma. And it was a system that white people, Europeans, developed, created, to build this country economically, socially. Knowing the history of what transpired back then, there's nothing to glamorize, even though people glamorize them as the antebellum period, and people dress in Antebellum period clothing, and for fun. Plantations, people continue to have weddings there at these places. The parallel I draw and I started looking at when I dissected the word ‘plantation’, is of the concent concentration camps in Germany. No one is having a wedding at Auschwitz.
HZ: In the interests of fact-checking, I ruined my own Google history by searching for “can you get married at Aushwitz”, and as far as I can see, you cannot. There is a former Nazi concentration camp in Lithuania, a fort built in the 19th century where 5-10,000 Jews were killed in a six-week period in 1941; it’s now a privately owned museum that has been hired for weddings.
Plantation weddings, though: still a strong trend, although at least now when you google them, you get a lot of results for “Why are people still getting married on plantations?” among the pictures of newlywed couples - predominantly white couples, surprise surprise - posing in an avenue of moss-draped trees or in front of a big house with white columns at the front.
KENNEDY WHITERS: The image that I have, as you mentioned, tall columns: the setting, the landscape, is that there's this palatial-appearing building, modelled after villas to assert wealth, dominance, power and class by Europeans in the United States, what became the United States, and this palatial building surrounded by acres and acres and acres of land. And typical crops that the enslaved Africans farmed were cotton, tobacco, especially on the southeastern coast of the United States, coffee and sugar - and I'm just speaking of the United States. Then outside of the villa, and what people are starting to speak to more of now, there were outbuildings that people call slave cabins or cabins where enslaved Black people slept, that were their quarters. And these are buildings that the enslaved Africans built, and we want to make sure we talk about that. And enslaved Black people and Indigenous people built the White House too, and the US Capitol in DC. But yes, palatial estate, that's why the word ‘plantation’ is associated with these words, because the buildings on the surface, they look architecturally -
HZ: - like a mini White House.
KENNEDY WHITERS: Yeah. They look very appealing. Like I said, they represent certain things because that's what arch- - I mean, we could talk another hour about architecture and buildings of propaganda. They're there to support a status.
HZ: There were around 46,000 plantations in operation in the American South by 1860, and now about 375 of them are plantation museums, with varying degrees of acknowledgement of what the white and wealthy inflicted upon enslaved African people - and their children born into slavery - on those sites.
KENNEDY WHITERS: Because we call it what it was: they were concentration camps. But yeah, in the United States, the honesty is just stripped from that, and the horrors that happened there. White men raped Black women, Black children. As soon as you were able to give birth, you were bred, basically. And there were forced labour camps that were breeding places: they would separate white people, separating Black families, sending the Black girls and women to go to the forced labour camps. And sometimes they would not only force men they didn't know, but even their own family members, onto them to rape them, to create more Black people that the white people enslaved to build up their capital in this country. And we can't just say the south, it was also in the north. And even if the north didn't have forced labour camps, they were profiting off the labour of enslaved Black and African people as well.
HZ: I feel like a lot of the language manages to de-emphasize the violence and the sexual violence.
KENNEDY WHITERS: But this is the trauma that we're talking about, that took place at these places that people continue to celebrate what's supposed to be one of the greatest things to happen in a person's life if they so choose. These are places, like I said, of deep trauma.
HZ: I don't even know how you could look at big white columns and think, “Oh, that's nice,” knowing what those houses mean.
KENNEDY WHITERS: Right. And perhaps it's the media that people allow themselves to see unless they receive it in a history lesson in school.
HZ: Even if you are taught things in history class, which a lot of us aren't even, it feels abstracted from real human experience or things that are still relevant to the present day, rather than things that are just kind of encapsulated in the past, like safely boxed away.
KENNEDY WHITERS: Yes. And as I continued on this research path, I recently was curious about why are people using redacted grammar? Why do people use the passive voice?
HZ: Passive voice was mentioned? The word ‘plantation’ is not the only linguistic component Kennedy has on watch. Throughout the month of February 2023, Black History Month, you can play Kennedy’s Redacted Bingo at unredactthefacts.com.
KENNEDY WHITERS: So I just launched this fun venture to encourage people to look for ways in which individuals and organizations are using redacted grammar and language to communicate historical narratives about Black history, which is US history. February is Black History Month. And so this is a time of year when we see an increase in these historical narratives. And so you can sign up on the website unredactthefacts.com that has an online bingo card that I set up; the squares are different examples of redacted grammar and language, so once you see a square, you tag the bingo card and keep a running list of the spot on your card and where you heard or read the redacted grammar and language - it could be on Twitter or it could be on Instagram, a website, or even a webinar or event that you attend. So one example, if you come across a euphemism for white people in a sentence.
HZ: Like what?
KENNEDY WHITERS: “The wealthy elite”, that's one example.
HZ: “Landowners”?
KENNEDY WHITERS: Landowners! Yes. Landowners. Enslavers. And by the end of February, February 28th, email your completed bingo card and your list of where you found and heard the redacted grammar and language.
HZ: Among the other squares on Kennedy’s Redacted Bingo card are: passive voice description of slavery; passive voice description of lynching; and passive voice description of civil rights movement. The passive voice is a problem because:
KENNEDY WHITERS: It hides who did what to whom.
There's intentionality in removing words and phrases, and to omit certain parts of a history intentionally.
And so what I saw, what sparked this whole journey of research - and I saw other posts in 2020, but the first one that I saw was early June: the national leader in the United States for historic preservation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, they have an initiative called Tell the Full American Story, and it's tied into their African American Action Heritage Fund that does great work in fundraising to finance historic preservation projects at Black historic sites across the US. But while they’re saying they're telling the full American story, they're doing it in one regard, through one lens, of highlighting the contributions of African Americans in the United States through financing these projects.
But in the way that they're telling the story, I found that they were using grammar and language that did not tell a full story, in that if we dive into the mechanics of sentence sentences and the story, they're using the passive voice in particular. That's what first caught my eye in 2020.
HZ: The National Trust for Historic Preservation had posted about a building they own in Washington DC, saying, I quote, “where people were held in bondage within view of the White House.”
KENNEDY WHITERS: Who were held in bondage? Who held them in bondage? To me, it seems as though this passive voice sentence is writing from the perspective of empathy for a white audience that might be offended, who might feel shame upon reading that people connected to them, their ancestors, held people in bondage. But this is history; we know that happened. So why aren't we writing about it in a very direct, open way?
And so that's where I began looking at reframing Tell the Full Story to being more direct about what is actually, what, what we're actually seeing and what we're actually hearing, which is redacted history. And so flipping that to say: let's try something new. Let's have a vision for a different way of writing and speaking the narrative, historical narratives. Why not unredact the facts of history to tell a fuller story for racial equity and healing? But also be honest about why people are not telling us in these parts of the history, why we are encouraged to write in the passive voice.
I go back to being a seventh grader and hearing my English teacher tell us that the passive voice is a “professional” way of writing. And this is what we're taught in school.
HZ: In like a lot of creative writing classes, they say don't use the passive voice - but, comparing that to what you were taught, where they were like, “it's the more official tone to strike,” and maybe that's because it does remove the activity from individuals and therefore makes it seem like it's just inevitable rather than the choices the of humans to. It kind of removes humans from the equation, even though humans have done all these things actively.
KENNEDY WHITERS: Knowing what I know now, why are we taught that the passive voice is a professional way of writing? And we can say from a legal perspective that there's a concern about libel, because you're saying who did what to whom, and you're making claims about an action that someone did to someone else. We live in a litigious society, so there's some protection involved in that. Well, who are we protecting? And that's where I've been going down this rabbit hole recently, about writing with empathy for the audience - and who is the audience that we are writing empathy for?
HZ: I mean, looking at who runs most media organizations in US and UK…
KENNEDY WHITERS: Why do people use the passive voice? Why are people using redacted grammar and language? It's by design there to create distance between the author of the text and the reader of the text and the events that they are reading and writing about. That's what the passive voice is by design constructed to do: mental distance. And so is it for reasons of protecting our emotions and our feelings, so that we don't become too close to these traumatic historical events?
And in that regard, I go back to what I said earlier about how there's intention behind writing with this redacted grammar and language, to hide history by design - to protect white supremacy, yes; but maybe there's also some element of this protecting our mental and emotional space. Because not only are white people using this, Black people use it too, and then other people of colour. That's another grammar framing that I am curious about: Black trauma versus the people who are creating the trauma. Because what I've read in defense of the passive voice is a desire to focus on the recipient of the violent act, the victim, the survivor; to shine a light on them in order to not glamorize, say, someone that the media calls a white supremacist or murderer, or someone that does this very violent act. And I understand that.
HZ: I wonder if there are any languages that don't have passive voice, and how things play out in those.
KENNEDY WHITERS: Yes. There's a Black woman poet - and I'm honoring her now, calling her an environmental designer because that's how she also wanted to be described as - June Jordan in 1982, she published an essay about the passive voice actually, and another article too, where she says that the passive voice is basically ingrained in standard English or white English as opposed to African American Vernacular English, that doesn't have a passive voice. And so there's this, you can say that “standard” white English, there is this element of the passive voice that perhaps is to create distance between the author, the reader, and the event. But yes, there are languages that, that do not have the passive voice, and one of them, the African American vernacular English or AAVE.
Britain is excellent at avoiding talking about or educating about or even acknowledging its history of participation in the transatlantic slave trade and long term repercussions thereof, but there’s a brilliant podcast series that can fill you in: Human Resources, made by Broccoli Productions and hosted by one of my favourite journalists Moya Lothian-McLean, who is descended from both enslaved Black Africans and white slave-owners. While you’re in your podcast app of choice, subscribe to some Black joy too: I recommend Private Affairs, a sexy funny fiction show about dating in Australia, and The Stacks, a great podcast about reading hosted by Traci Thomas, and she runs a monthly virtual bookclub too. Get amongst it!
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
embrave, verb transitive: to make showy, to decorate (Spenser)
- I think that means it’s from Spenser, not that you decorate Spenser -
to inspire with bravery.
Try using ‘embrave’ in an email today.
Today you heard from Kennedy Whiters, who is an architect - her firm is wrkSHäp | kiloWatt - and she runs unRedact the Facts, researching the use of redacted grammar and language in historical narratives and posting about it on Instagram and Twitter and at unredactthefacts.com where you can find the Redacted Bingo card too. This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with original music by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Nancy Friedman for her useful piece on Visual Thesaurus about plantation-named things being rebranded. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you want to hear me make your product sound compelling, you can sponsor an episode of the Allusionist, contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads.
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