By Kelly McWilliams

I’m the author of a book called Your Plantation Prom is Not Okay, and it had just gone into copyedits when friends started texting me about Bennifer’s very-much-not-okay plantation wedding in August 2022. Because I, along with the rest of America, was rooting for Bennifer, I didn’t believe it at first. Then I saw the photos of that quintessential plantation house, and anger and shock broke over me, followed by a tired grief. Like a monster in a 90’s slasher, plantation weddings are a kind of racism that just won’t die. Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe threw a problematic wedding in 1999, and Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds tied the knot at Boone Hall Plantation in 2012 (they’ve since apologized—more on that later). More recently, the Biebers got married on a plantation site in 2018, and frankly, in the South especially, regular folks still celebrate on plantations all the time.

And it’s never okay, because a plantation wedding, like all forms of racism, is inherently violent. Many of us know that experiencing prejudice in daily life—a shouted slur, a point joke—is like being physically attacked. Your blood pressure spikes and your heart pounds. Your body snaps into its trauma response, and later shame consumes you, even though it doesn’t make any sense. You’ve just been hit, and your called-out, freaked-out body thinks, I don’t belong, I’m not safe here, I’d better get out! It’s truly like being stabbed in the gut, and science (and commonsense) tells us that if we get stabbed too many times, we’ll die. This is literally true: it’s why Black folks have poorer lifetime health outcomes than white folks, and why maternal mortality in the Black community is so high. Our blood pressure is too high, because people are always stabbing us, and we never know who or why or when it might happen. Add that to the ever-present poison of inequality—our higher incarceration rates, our lower pay, and the actual poison in the water of our communities (in Flint, for example)—and you’ve already got a recipe for pain.

Now let’s imagine you’re walking down the Internet, scrolling like you do, when you come across an outrageous news item: A couple of celebrities (ahem: Bennifer) got married on a plantation. A plantation, which was a site of forced labor and family separation and unmarked graves. Your body’s still going to have a physical response, because this is still violence. Only that plantation wedding (all-white, with Gone with the Wind-meets-Etsy vibes) isn’t like the remark that stabs you on the street, and the message isn’t simply, you don’t belong. 

A plantation wedding tells us: Sorry, but you don’t exist and never have. If that were a weapon zapping us out of existence, it’d be like something from Star Trek. In fact, since the ’70s, historians have called the erasure and underrepresentation of people symbolic annihilation. 

If the word ‘annihilation’ makes you think of a bomb, well, that’s at least symbolically accurate. A plantation wedding (or prom, or party) is a total wipeout of the truth. It’s an erasure of you and me and the people so many of us are descended from, those enslaved human beings who suffered so much.

You may be surprised to learn that you encounter the violence of symbolic annihilation all the time. Just pick a nickel out of your change drawer, and check out the forced labor camp embossed on the flipside. Thomas Jefferson enslaved six hundred people across two plantations, the most famous of which lives forever on our coin. It’s supposed to represent our national pride, but in doing so, it obscure—annihilates—our national shame.

Isn’t it tricky, how such violence can hide in plain sight?

And doesn’t it hurt?

Symbols are powerful, and hardly anything is more symbolic than a wedding, with its expensive dresses and elaborate rituals. A wedding is supposed to represent union and family, but plantations were built on family separation. On children ripped from mothers who had no legal right to marry anyone. By partying in a place of horror, plantation wedding goers are denying the truth of what actually happened there. They’re re-writing the world without the descendants of enslaved people in it, smothering history with senseless lace, and that’s violence, plain and simple.

But here’s the good news: such violence can be undone.

After George Floyd’s killing, Ryan Reynolds apologized for his and Lively’s choice to be married on a plantation, effectively re-contextualizing their hurtful act.

“What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest,” he told Fast Company in 2020. “What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.”

What they saw was the truth, stripped of the symbolism that attempted to suffocate it.

Around the same time, activists at the Color of Change also got involved in canceling plantation wedding symbolism, penning a petition against the glorification of antebellum America perpetuated on social media—with terrific results. A host of wedding industry companies, including Pinterest and The Knot, vowed to keep plantation-promoting imagery off their sites. It’s no surprise that around this time, I started developing an idea for a novel about a teenager who leverages technology to cancel her school’s plantation prom.

Because surely, this was definitive progress, I thought. Even A-listers have to get the memo. Then along came Bennifer just this August, breaking our hearts all over again.

As a society, it’s abundantly clear that we still haven’t agreed on what our history means, or why it matters, perhaps because so many keep trying to zap the truth out of existence. Or maybe—hopefully—we’re just bearing witness to the slow pace of change. That long arc of history President Obama used to tell us about. After all, annihilation is hard to recover from. Change will take more work, and patience, and time.

Recently, I moved to Seattle, where a ten-ton Confederate monument was toppled in 2020. In a café near my house, I overheard a couple of older white folks talking about this event in ways that made my blood pressure spike and my heart pound.

They didn’t just topple it, they defaced it, a white man said. It was vandalism. 

Was the toppling of that monument the violent act of vandals—really and truly?

Or was the violence already present, in the monument’s very existence?

The way those older folks spoke about the work of activists convinced me that the monument, like a truth-denying, humanity-erasing Star Trek weapon, had worked. To them, only one side of the story mattered. They couldn’t imagine that the monument, built in 1926, had been lashing out at every Black or Native person who encountered it for hundreds of years. They couldn’t see that as it cut us and hurt us, it was also spreading the same lie these toxic plantation weddings do. They couldn’t see, because the monument’s job was to reflect the bright, sharp lies we’ve been telling ourselves for ages about human enslavement—that it didn’t really matter, that it wasn’t that bad, that it was oh so long ago—and those lies blinded them.

A plantation wedding (or prom, or party) is also a weaponized lie.

Don’t buy into it, don’t believe it, and do email, or boycott, or sub-tweet the celebrities that keep violently breaking our hearts.

Symbol by symbol, we can disarm these lies. Fight violence with truth.

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Further citations: 

• Symbolic annihilation was also discussed in conjunction with plantation weddings in Representations of Slavery by Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small

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Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay by Kelly McWilliams is available now wherever books are sold.

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Kelly McWilliams is the author of the YA novel, YOUR PLANTATION PROM IS NOT OKAY (May 2023, Little, Brown Young Readers) and MIRROR GIRLS. She’s written for Time, Publisher’s Weekly, and Bustle, among other outlets.