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thisisntmynametoday t1_irzj7k1 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in What's your opinion on renaming Plantation Street because it's racist? by [deleted]

Your original argument was that the name Plantation was harmless in the context of Worcester history.

I repeatedly demonstrated the problems with your assumptions based off of cursory Google searches. To do so, I pointed out historical events you hadn’t googled yet.

Now you keep moving the goalposts in an attempt to save face by saying I want to change lots of place names. I don’t. Your misdirection is not working.

If you would care to educate yourself about the colonial history of enslavement I recommend the following books I’ve read on the subject:

Our Beloved Kin - Lisa Brooks This Land Is Their Land - David Silverman The Other Slavery - Andrés Reséndez The Indian Slave Trade - Alan Gallay

And if you’re not inclined to read a book, Frank James’ article “A National Day of Mourning” might help get the points I’m making across in less time.

And for the record, it’s a People’s History of the United States, not a People’s History of America. If you had read that book, maybe you might not have shown your ignorance of colonial history on a public forum. Zinn does briefly cover Massachusetts colonial history in the first chapter.

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[deleted] OP t1_is0nrtm wrote

Whatever. You started off with "Quinsigamond Plantation was part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade," which implies that it was something more than just some outpost and was actually used for the slave trade. But then when I asked for a source, you started in with posts about, "Plantation isn't a Nipmuc word!" and went after a vagary in what I wrote, suggesting that I didn't know the British were Europeans or that the Europeans gave it the name, all trying to move away from the actual point, which was that the word "plantation" in this context had no connection to the slave plantations of the south and entirely pre-dates them.

Now you're telling me, "Oh, you should learn things, durr durr," in response to me pointing out that your logic leads to the word "plantation" being offensive only insofar as every single other colonial name is offensive.

And sorry I mis-named the book I read and found overly superficial decades ago while quickly typing at very odd hours this morning.

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thisisntmynametoday t1_is3571v wrote

This is the progress of your “not all plantations” argument. All of these points are demonstrably false, as outlined in many of the books I’ve posted previously.

❌ The area was called Quinsigamond Plantation even before the Europeans settled here. —> ❌Let me try to explain this very clearly: before these British people, a subset of Europeans, settled on the land, they were already calling it Quinsigamond Plantation. —> ❌Therefore, this means that the word "plantation" was applied to the area by someone well before there was slavery in the area, so it is impossible that the name is derived in any way from slavery. We also know that "plantation' was a term that was generally used for farms before the 1800s.

Actual history: The Europeans who settled here were English colonists from Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies. There was no previous use of the word Plantation in Quinsigamond prior to colonization here. The only people here were Nipmuc and other native tribes. They certainly weren’t using the word plantation.

Multiple tribes were attacked and sold into slavery by the colonists. The first mass sale of Pequots happened in 1637. Some were kept domestically, most were sold to sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Also, the first slave auction in the colonies happened in 1619 in Virginia. Plantations weren’t “just farms” until 1800, when things magically changed in your unsourced Wikipedia article.

Sources: Our Beloved Kin - Lisa Brooks This Land Is Their Land - David J. Silverman

This is a small symbolic change with minor implications. Manufacturing a ton of outrage and defending plantations illuminates the mindset of its proponents.

Ultimately we should work on larger structural changes to benefit people whose families have been damaged by slavery and plantations, but I’m pretty sure you aren’t ready for that conversation.

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[deleted] OP t1_is5xrqu wrote

Bro, it's obvious what the guy is saying: the British Europeans claimed the land and called it Quinsigamond Plantation before they had settlers there.

Why do you keep citing those books? They don't prove anything. The other commenter(s) is/are right. If you want to say "plantation" is a problem, it's not because of the reason that the school stated. They talked about the connotations of the word, which bring up antebellum slavery, but you're talking about the way colonists behaved toward Native Americans. The guy who said the logic of "plantation" also applies to many other names is right and you don't even respond to that. You just repeat what you said on a different comment.

What did the city councilor representing the district say yesterday at the meeting of the city council?

>He said that a name change would require the roughly 6,700 residents and 100 businesses on Plantation Street, Plantation Parkway and Plantation Terrace to change legal and identification documents, change official addresses and go through all sorts of other hassles at considerable expense...
>
>

“It just isn’t fair,’ Russell continued. “It could have been a moment for this community to come together — and hope it is in the future — but all this petition does is inconvenience people on Plantation Street and mobilize people into their respective political corners.”

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