Southern plantation museums enact racism through omission and hierarchy without explicit hatred

Evidence

Is it racism? Not in the old-fashioned sense. There is no formal expression of a belief in white superiority and black inferiority, no explicit hatred directed towards African Americans, no mention of the word “Nigger,” no explicit praising of the Ku Klux Klan. Nor is there obvious derogation of Native Americans. But I believe it constitutes racialized hostility. Overall there is a level of symbolic hostility and a clear manifestation of superiority and distortion. These sites pretend to offer an accurate, even comprehensive, account of Southern history. The institution of slavery in all its atrocities, the suffering and exploitation of African Americans, the impressive resilience and resistance that they offerered, is depersonalized, marginalized, deflected, rendered secondary to the splendor and opulence of stately homes, the exuberant lifestyles of affluent whites, which is emphasized and articulated. In sum this is a society “gone with the wind.” In this narrative it is the white South which is the victim, and the white North which is victimizer, as when the whites working to make uniforms for the Confederacy are imprisoned and dragged off to the North; or when the owners of impressive houses find them ransacked and burnt. Overall it is an affront to African Americans, one which at the same time pacifies and reassures White southerners. Earlier generations would call it institutional racism in its outcomes. I prefer to think of these museum-plantations as the sites of a racialized ideology. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1903

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘racialized ideology’ as distinct from old-fashioned explicit racism — symbolic hostility, distortion, and marginalization rather than explicit hatred.
• XREF: Connects to the concept of ‘symbolic power’ and structural racism debates; Bourdieu’s symbolic violence and Gramsci’s hegemony both hover behind this passage.
• SEED: Possible essay: how heritage tourism sites narrate history via omission — the museum-plantation as a case study in how the built environment encodes racialized ideology surreptitiously.