White Supremacist
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The Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana burned down, and social media users expressed a wide range of emotions in response.
The Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana, billed as “the South’s largest remaining antebellum mansion”, was devoured by a fire over the past weekend. The responses to the fire have been a mix of emotions ranging from jubilation over the destruction of a symbol rooted in the horrors of the enslavement of Black people, to some expressing sadness as it represented “the good old South” and their memories of weddings held there.
Located 65 miles northwest of New Orleans, the 53,000-square-foot mansion had been rebranded as the Nottoway Resort in recent years, featuring amenities such as 40 overnight rooms, a honeymoon suite, a lounge, fitness center, and an outdoor pool and cabana. According to the National Park Service, 155 enslaved people were recorded at Nottoway Plantation in 1860. The website for Nottoway doesn’t mention those people at all. And according to property owner Dan Dyess’ words in the New York Post, there is no intent to do so: “We are trying to make this a better place. We don’t have any interest in left wing radical stuff. We we need to move forward on a positive note here and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice.”
That sentiment contrasts with how social media rejoiced in Nottoway burning down. One historian, Dr. Mia Crawford-Johnson, shared a selfie taken across from the site of the mansion burning down, which went viral. Others also shared videos celebrating the mansion’s destruction by fire as justice for those who were enslaved, with some using it as an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response video and editing the video with background music choices like Usher’s “Let It Burn.”
Some historians have lamented the lost chance to preserve Nottoway as a site to illustrate the skill and ingenuity of Black enslaved people. “There are no perfect answers here,” writes noted author and chef Michael W. Twitty in an MSNBC article. “Nottoway could have gone the way of Whitney Plantation, also in Louisiana, which is a museum dedicated to helping visitors understand who the enslaved people were.” When contacted, Whitney Plantation Museum Executive Director Ashley Rogers felt that Nottoway’s chance to go that route was lost long before the blaze. “It was a resort,” Rogers said. “I don’t know that it being there or not being there has anything to do with how we preserve the history of slavery. They already weren’t.”
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Source: Xinhua News Agency / Getty
The murderous white supremacist teenager who ruthlessly gunned down 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, last year will spend the rest of his natural life behind bars. And while that won’t bring the victims back to life, perhaps it will grant their family members some semblance of peace.
According to the Grio, Judge Susan Eagan kept things plain with 19-year-old Payton Gendron—whose adherence to the white nationalist “great replacement theory” helped inspire him to commit the massacre—when she told him, “There can be no mercy for you, no understanding, no second chances,” before sentencing him Wednesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Before Eagan handed down her sentence, the court heard emotional testimony from family members of the victims.
From the Grio:
Tamika Harper, a niece of victim Geraldine Talley, said she hoped Gendron would pray for forgiveness.
“Do I hate you? No. Do I want you to die? No. I want you to stay alive. I want you to think about this every day of your life,” she said, speaking gently. “Think about my family and the other nine families that you’ve destroyed forever.”
Gendron locked eyes with Harper as she spoke, then lowered his head and cried.
Kimberly Salter, the widow of security guard Aaron Salter, explained that she and her family were wearing “red for the blood that he shed for his family and for his community, and black because we are still grieving.”
Other family members made sure their rage was loud and clear when confronting Gendron.
One man charged at him and had to be led out of the courtroom.
After the victim testimonies, the court heard Gendron’s brief statement about how he “shot and killed people because they were Black,” just before sliding in an explanation literally nobody cared to hear about how the internet made him do it.
“I believed what I read online and acted out of hate, and now I can’t take it back, but I wish I could, and I don’t want anyone to be inspired by me,” he said, just before a woman in the courtroom who couldn’t take it anymore stood up and let it be known that “we don’t need” his useless mea culpa, and then she stormed out.
Good riddance to another violent white supremacist, and may they all share his fate.
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