People are renting out real slave shacks on Airbnb

Airbnb has had its some of the most publicized issues recentlybut none of them tops the atrocity one TikToker pointed out this week: The site is home to multiple vacation rental listings for former slave quarters — a pretty bold move for a company that prides itself on diversity and inclusion.

Wynton Yates, an entertainment and civil rights lawyer who goes by @LawyerWynton on TikTok, recently exposed an Airbnb listing (since deleted) advertised as “The Panther Burn Cottage @ Belmont Plantation” in Greenville, Mississippi. In its description – as seen in screenshots on Yates’ TikTok – the listing boldly states that the cottage once served as a slave quarters in the 1830s before being used as a sharecropper’s hut and later as a closet. medical. To add insult to injury, the owner of the listing has Superhost status, a designation Airbnb gives to “someone who will above and beyond in their hosting duties and is a shining example of what a host should be.

“The owner of this property earns money through slavery.” -Wynton Yates

They indeed exceeded our lowest expectations. If the entire list wasn’t tone-deaf enough, the reviews below were even worse. “We enjoyed everything about our stay,” wrote one guest, Kristin. Another guest, Katie, had a lot to say about the surroundings and nothing at all to say about the fact that she had stayed in a Yassified torture chamber. “Highly recommend watching the sunset!” Mic contacted Airbnb and Belmont Plantation for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

Yates tells me his brother saw the list for the first time and sent it to a family newsgroup. His first thought when he saw the photo was that it couldn’t be real; when he searched on Airbnb, he was flabbergasted to see that was the case. “Growing up, [my family] would take my siblings and my cousins ​​and me and put slave irons in our hands so we could feel the weight of the steel that was put on the bodies of our ancestors to contain them,” Yates says. . “Seeing someone blatantly mock this just didn’t sit well with me.”

If it weren’t real, it would make a fascinating parody of Americans’ willful ignorance of black history. Unfortunately, this is real life, and it only scratches the surface of something far more sinister. The listing featured in Yates’ TikTok has since been removed (the cottage is still displayed on the the planting site, but the booking link points to the now defunct Airbnb page) – but a quick search reveals there are many more like this. There is this “little house” cottage on a Georgia plantation named after a slave who lived there; this New Orleans “suite” where slaves once lived; this mansion with “newly renovated guest rooms at the back of the house [that] formerly served as a slave quarters”; this “historically renovated slave quarter” location that features “exposed brick walls”; and this restored and “haunted” former slave house in the heart of New Orleans.

It’s especially shocking how many of these lists openly state origins, without many (if any) acknowledging the sordid history. The “little house” in Georgia is part of a non-profit plantation – according to the website, rental proceeds are reinvested in the upkeep of the plantation – although the offer of an actual treehouse slaves like a rental with “rustic charm”, nevertheless leaves a bad taste. The mentions of slavery and education on the plantation’s website, meanwhile, seem pretty sanitized. The listing for the ‘haunted’ cottage mentions its ‘difficult past’, but quickly glosses over the fact of slavery: ‘It started out as a slave quarter, then was purchased by a family in 1858 who resided in the house until 1915″. descriptive statements. “In 1902 the house created a great deal of drama in the neighborhood as it had an explosion in the kitchen which caused minor damage to the house but set fire to other properties in the neighborhood. There have been reports from sites ghosts here.

All of this begs the question: do white people in this country take slavery seriously?

In the 1800s, thousands of slave quarters and huts were built on the site of plantations across the country. In them, children and adults death from disease, abuse and overwork. The plantations were cemeteries and places of unfathomable human misery where families were torn apart; some have referred to these southern plantations as “America’s Auschwitz”, referring to one of the best-known Holocaust concentration camps, Smithsonian Magazine reported. To transform these slave quarters into cutesy hotel rooms is at best to trivialize the human life that is lost there; at worst, it is an outright denial of the humanity of slaves.

“They have the privilege of mentally removing themselves from this story because they are not affected by it these days.” -Wynton Yates

When you try to understand the type of people who choose to ignore the history of slavery by taking bubble baths in a place where black people met horrible fates, it’s hard not to take note that the Most, if not all, of the customers who wrote glowing reviews are apparently white. While we don’t know exactly what these people were thinking when they booked or stayed at the former slave cabins, Yates has his suspicions. “They don’t care about the real history of this space,” he says. “They care about the plantation in its visual beauty. … They have the privilege of removing themselves mentally from this history because they are not affected by it nowadays. In contrast, he notes, “if you were to put a black American in that space, the emotional reaction would be night and day.” While this is, of course, Yates’ own speculation, it’s not hard to see how he got there.

So, what to do with these structures instead of renting them? Yates suggests commemorating plantations and slave quarters, citing the (nonprofit) Whitney Plantation outside of New Orleans as an example of a place that doesn’t shy away from its history. He also thinks that people who own land where other people were enslaved should take the time to learn about this history and really think about the fact that they are making money off the backs of people from color. “If we look at it honestly,” he tells me. “The owner of this property earns money through slavery.”

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