The horrific legacy of slavery doesn't need these physical monuments to be remembered

🔥 The burning of Nottoway Plantation, a structure built on the backs of enslaved Black people, represents more than the loss of architecture. It marks the symbolic crumbling of a monument to brutal oppression that should never be romanticized.

Let's be absolutely clear: Nottoway wasn't simply a "grand home." It was a site of systematic torture, family separation, sexual violence, and forced labor. The enslaved people who suffered and died there were denied their humanity, their freedom, and often their very names. 

These were real people, with dreams, loves, and lives stolen from them, not footnotes in a whitewashed history.

The outrage expressed by some over this building's destruction reveals a deeply disturbing moral failure. How can anyone shed more tears for wooden beams and columns than for the countless Black bodies broken within those walls? 

This selective empathy exposes the persistent devaluation of Black life and suffering that continues to poison our society.

Those who mourn this plantation while simultaneously supporting the removal of honest discussions about slavery from classrooms aren't interested in "preserving history”, they're interested in preserving a sanitized myth that comforts rather than confronts.

The horrific legacy of slavery doesn't need these physical monuments to be remembered. It lives on in the generational trauma, systemic inequalities, and lived experiences of Black Americans today. 

If you genuinely care about "history," start by honoring the full humanity of those who were enslaved, not the structures built to contain them.

The ashes of Nottoway should remind us that no architectural beauty can justify or outweigh the human cost of its creation.

Happy Monday 🤭

AA✨