A planned Cleveland, Miss., Trump-branded hotel will celebrate the antebellum South with a replica-style Southern plantation complete with a cotton-gin-styled meeting hall, because of course it would.
The project, which will bear the Trump name, will cost some $20 million and will reportedly have “a resort-caliber pool, place decorative balconies on the main building, and construct a hill for another building—a faux Southern mansion,” Bloomberg reports. “The property’s 17 acres will have a spa, bars, and a meeting hall styled as a cotton gin.”
Why would anyone want to celebrate a time when whites owned ... wait, of course this makes sense, considering the “Make America great again” lifestyle. The South has a fascination with the past, and don’t be fooled—by “the past,” I don’t just mean a time when everyone had a porch and sipped mint juleps. I’m sure that’s a part of it, but let’s be clear: This fascination with the antebellum past has a whole lot to do with America’s convoluted history. For every bit of pearl clutching, there were also slave quarters. But America is fucked up this way: It continues to celebrate a time when people in the country were enslaved, under the guise of acknowledging history.
Antebellum nostalgia is also seen in the growing popularity of plantations as locations for weddings, as Attn: noted earlier this year:
Liz Susong, co-founder and editor-in-chief of online magazine Catalyst Wedding Co., said that the word “plantation” has been normalized despite [its] racist history. “I think a lot of the history of properties has been really white washed,” she told ATTN:.
Brides who have a plantation wedding are often focused on the pretty location and ignore the problematic history, according to Susong.
Clearly, but none of this is surprising considering that the president of racial hatred was upset that the beautiful statues of racists from the Confederacy were being removed because, you know, they are racists and didn’t want blacks to be free.