The Possibilities of Plantation Field Trips as Sites of Racial Literacy

On a fall Thursday afternoon, the author sat with students, who were preservice social studies teachers, and discussed approaches to teaching slavery to high school students. As the discussion continued, the author began to ask about their experiences learning about the institution of chattel slavery in the United States South. During this conversation the author formed questions about plantation field trips: What do students experience on plantation field trips? Did students leave these field trips with a greater understanding of how the institution of slavery laid the foundation for contemporary racial disparities and hierarchies? How did Black students experience these field trips? As a descendant of enslaved Africans who grew up in a large metropolitan area in the South, the author had never visited a plantation, and had never been interested in doing so. The author immediately began to think about Black students who attended these field trips with their White classmates. More than a century and a half after the end of the Civil War, dozens of plantations in South Carolina are still available for tourists to visit. While the author knew that the best way to answer this flood of questions would involve taking students to visit a plantation, the author also understood there to be a great possibility that such sites could cause harm to students. For this reason, the author decided to visit Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, which claims to be the most visited plantation in South Carolina, alone. Using racial literacy as a conceptual framework for this autoethnographic study, the author embarked on this plantation visit wondering about the possibilities for visitors gaining a sense of racial literacy upon their visits to this former rice plantation.