In 2015, I visited two plantations in rural Louisiana to write a college thesis on white supremacy. One, Whitney Plantation, centered the experiences of enslaved people by sharing “experience stories” and incorporating statues and monuments to them. The other, Oak Alley Plantation, romanticized the pre-Civil War South. I was outraged and couldn’t understand how tourists drank mint juleps on Oak Alley, where brutality, violence, and terror once reigned. Clint Smith, author of How the word is passed on, examines sites of racial violence in the United States to create a more accurate American “public memory.” We need Smith’s poetic-sociological vision to tell the true, humanizing stories of our – often ugly – history.
During my visit, Oak Alley was selling copies of Little Black Sambo by Scottish author and illustrator Helen Bannerman in her gift shop (the shop no longer sells this title). The racist children’s book from 1899 is about a family widely considered to be Tamil. It portrays dark-skinned Indians in a strong “pickaninny” caricature. In the book Racial Innocence Historian Robin Bernstein explains, “The pickaninny was an imaginary, subhuman black youth, typically depicted outdoors, cheerfully accepting (or even provoking) violence.” This dangerous stereotype desensitizes us to violence against black and brown children, evident throughout history from slavery to police brutality. My family is part Tamil, and I nearly choked when I saw this “artifact” of dehumanization disguised as nostalgia.
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