How To Choose an Ethical Plantation Tour in the US—and Why It Matters

It’s been many years since I went on my tour, but there’s still debate about whether it’s ethical to visit a plantation. Some would say that people shouldn’t visit plantations, fraught as they were with human rights abuses of enslaved Black people … especially those that now exploit slavery for (further) profit by hosting weddings or parties on the grounds.

Rogers believes plantation tours can be ethical ... as long as they're handled differently. “People disrespect plantations so much because plantations themselves have set that expectation that it is a site of leisure, where you can go off and have fun,” says Rogers. “We have to reeducate our visitors somewhat [to] remember that this is a site of memory, and that we're honoring people here.”

Opened to the public as a museum in 2014, the Whitney Plantation is one of the few spaces of its kind dedicated to the reality of life on the plantation from an enslaved person’s perspective, via museum exhibits and recorded narratives available in multiple languages and accessible for the Deaf and hard of hearing. It’s also one of the only—if not the only—plantation in the US that’s part of an organization called the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which aims to prevent the historical erasure of sites of significant atrocity and human rights abuses. Rather, the lessons of the past should be used to inform the future.

This approach is what sets the Whitney Plantation apart from other US plantations, per Rogers, as well as the fact that a vast swathe of tourists come here with the intent to remember the people who were enslaved here or honor their own ancestors. (Around 40 percent of Whitney visitors are Black, according to recent numbers.)

Even so, plantation visits remain a complicated gray area of tourism. “[Although] we’re a memorial site … we’re still being marketed as a tourist site,” stated Rogers. “We’re in the middle of this really dense area for tourism, and we couldn’t exist as a site if it weren’t for people coming here, so it’s very complicated.”

Many people don’t want to confront the reality of slavery while on vacation. But if you're visiting a city that was built on the back of slavery, then you must engage with that history meaningfully rather than pretend like it doesn’t exist.

“You get to choose the type of vacation that you want to take,” says Rogers. “But if you're going to enjoy the architecture, and enjoy the food, and all of the things that make New Orleans such a famous destination for tourists, you can't do that without acknowledging the fact that it's African people who brought the food; it's African people who built the houses; it's African people who created the music and the culture that we all love so much. And you can't enjoy that stuff without engaging with the history of slavery.”

When choosing an ethical plantation tour, it’s vital to look for plantations that shine a light on the Black voices or hire descendants as opposed to focusing on the slave owners. “The entire point of the plantation [was] to enslave people. Plantations don’t exist without slavery,” explains Rogers. “They’re not pretty houses. They are labor camps that were established to drive capitalist profit to very wealthy landowners. So, if you’re not talking about slavery [on your plantation tour], then you’re not actually talking about the plantation. You wouldn’t talk about a concentration camp and only talk about where the officers lived; it doesn’t make any sense.”

There’s an uphill battle to get people to be respectful at plantations, believes Rogers, because so many people equate plantations to places of leisure, where they can have fun and take beautiful photos. As such, many visitors have to be reminded that they’re visiting a memorial to honor enslaved people, not just a pretty antebellum mansion.

“[At the Whitney Plantation], we have a sign in the front that says something like, ‘We ask that you behave in a way that benefits their memory,’” explains Rogers. “What we want to encourage among visitors is this sense of respect and reverence for ancestral people who were here, [while] always remembering that we’re talking about real people … about real experiences.”

While photos are allowed so that people can take home memories and remember their time at Whitney, photoshoots using the plantation as a pretty backdrop are a huge no-no. “White supremacy is working, because we’re convinced that the plantation is a beautiful house, and the story starts and stops there. And the great irony is that many plantations are beautiful places. It’s a very lovely place where people suffered,” says Rogers.

Similarly, although many plantations allow (very profitable) weddings to take place on their grounds, you should skip spots that clearly use the setting primarily for profit rather than education. Is the plantation you’re eyeing up for a visit advertising wedding or party packages? That’s a pretty clear sign that it’s not going to talk about the real history of slavery, and would be best avoided. “I’m also not going to allow corporations to come here and use this place as a backdrop. Because, for me, it’s someone else deciding what the narrative is about this place and taking that power away from us.”

However, Rogers adds that she has a personal caveat to the wedding policy. “If somebody approached me and wanted to get married here—not in front of the big house, but in, for instance, the Black Freedmen's Church that we have on-site—because that’s an important part of their story … I would be happy to have people here. I mean, there's people here in this community who did get married in that church; it was an active church until 2005.”

After your tour, you may find yourself wanting to be more informed about slavery and its continued impact on Black people into the present day. In that case, Rogers advises you to get involved within your own communities.

“What I really want visitors to do when they leave here is to find ways in their own communities that this history is still reverberating,” she notes. “I want people to take this information, and then do something in their own local community to try to make meaningful change.”

“Don’t go on a tour of a plantation if they only peddle a white supremacist narrative,” says Rogers, rejecting the idea that you should speak up if you find yourself on a clearly unethical experience—“trying to ask [the staff] questions they can't answer [is] only ever going to be some kind of "gotcha" moment and it won't do anything.”

Instead, work to make the change post-tour.

“Put pressure on them. Organize campaigns to get them to change. Make it clear that you want to hear about the history of slavery at these sites,” she says. “If plantation sites never hear from their OWN audiences that they want change, it won't happen,” adding that working at a community level, rather than a national one, is more likely to have an impact.

While the Whitney Plantation is considered a gold standard for ethical plantation tours and visits in the US, there are a few other spots across the American South that Rogers recommends for travelers interested in taking an ethical plantation tour.

First, Tennessee’s Belle Meade Plantation offers a Journey to Jubilee tour (although, it’s worth noting that much of the site’s marketing still relies on the beauty of the mansion house and its on-site winery).

Then there’s McLeod Plantation in South Carolina, which foregrounds the labor of the enslaved Africans who once lived there, and Savannah’s Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters, which recently added “slave quarters” to its official name to acknowledge and honor its past.

But if you find yourself in New Orleans, aside from the Whitney, Rogers also recommends the Hermann-Grima House. “This is not a plantation, but [it] was also a site of enslavement. They do an urban enslavement tour, focusing on mostly enslaved domestics who worked in that space.”