Going about this the wrong way.

[blueburndown]

I'm pretty sure there is some sort of difference between wearing a nazi uniform as wedding gear, and living in a 200 year old house in the south.
I can't really articulate why, exactly, these are two different things...





It would be more accurate to ask if they would have a wedding in a concentration camp.

Who knows, maybe in a 100 years when the camps have returned to nature we'll build apartment complexes over them, but I'm kind of betting not.

Comments

[blueburndown.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get that. It's actually from a post about those white people who had the 'colonial african' wedding.IDK if you caught that drama.

While I agree that it's just a building, I can see why some people would view it in the same way as nazi's. I think part of it is the historical context is so far removed. I was going to write this scathing, 'These are totally not the same' kind of post. But for some people I guess it kind of is.

I honestly totally forgot you had a wedding in an antebellum house, hope you weren't too offended.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

No worries. I actually come from a town that was a hospital town during the Civil War, so it has a fair number of antebellum houses still standing - and they're a significant source of the town's income, since a number of people tour them every year. And the whole "moonlight and magnolias" crappy nostalgia trip makes more money than the honest history, so they play it up - for several years in my childhood, I wore crinoline and hoopskirt and guided people around on one of the tours. :-/ I feel a little weird about it now, but at the time I really was too young to know any better.

My high school world history teacher started a graveyard tour through the cemetery that houses a Civil War burial ground, in which each of his US History students drew a name of someone buried there and researched them; the fifteen most interesting ones dressed up as the character and portrayed them for one of those tours. A South Asian kid drew one of the founders of the state's first KKK group. For a while, he was conflicted about whether to do this at all; he finally decided that portraying the guy as honestly as possible - good family man, mediocre Confederate officer, miserable racist - was the right and honest thing to do. No romanticization, no polishing, but no demonization either - just the bare truth. I got to watch him perform the role, in the traditional white linen suit; it was pretty powerful, where a white kid in the suit might have been squicktastic. But I don't know if an African American kid could have ever brought himself to play the bastard in the first place, nor would I (or the teacher) have asked him to.

I guess what I'm saying is that real history, as it's lived, is a messy thing. There's a 4' x 4' room in my grandmother's basement, brick on all sides with a heavy pine door that latched from the outside. There are screw-holes in the brick, and I know what used to be there. You don't put that room on the tour; the tourists don't want to see it, don't want to remember. But maybe we should. Every white person has shackles in their grandmother's basement somewhere; for me, they were just a little more literal than most.