Cursed White Supremacy Walking Tour 2017

CW: chattel slavery (antiblackness, human trafficking, descendants of traffickers still making money off it), my mother being a smug horror movie waiting to happen

So this is simultaneously the spookiest thing that has ever happened to me, and the unpleasant spiritual experience I begrudge the least, because I think you will agree that all of these responses were entirely proportional and frankly pretty generous.

So in 2017, my mother went on a trip to Savannah, Georgia, to do one of those Haunted Savannah For Tourists walking tours. She was so excited! And she told me I should come join them! I knew, just knew, when she said the house was beautiful that they were going so far as to stay in a goddamn plantation house. This is the exchange we had via text.

She told me, “LMAO!!! I will lol”

She clearly thought I was kidding. My best friend’s first comment when I told her about this was, “she gon die” She didn’t die but… Well. Please enjoy these screenshots of the update I gave my friends on Discord.

I did stop having thematically-upsetting dreams and inexplicable sudden injuries after I went outside to leave some food and apologize. I think I said something to the extent of, “I don’t know what she is doing down there, but I’m sure it’s awful, and I am really sorry.” What else can you even say?

I didn’t hear of anything unpleasant happening to my mother (other than being seen hitting on Paula Deen’s son), but her best friend who went with them on the trip, the one who was having such a great time laughing at me, got home and had multiple areas of her life collapse inside a week. I am still not sure if my mother noticed the timing, but well… she notices what she wants to notice. This was her chatting to me about the state of this friend’s life all of a sudden.

I warned them!

Now, on the one hand, this sucks because this is the only one of my mother’s friends I like. On the other hand, it sucks because I was definitely not intending to get my mother off the hook for all this nonsense behavior. Like I said before: entirely proportional.

But the moral of the story is, show some goddamn respect to the accumulated suffering of generations of human trafficking victims that is the foundation of our entire history as a nation. Or else. Don’t fuck with dead people. Especially don’t fuck with these dead people. If minimal common decency isn’t enough of a motivator, maybe fear will get the job done. Are you a white person going out of your way to benefit from the legacy of chattel slavery? You’ll deserve what you get.