From Grenfell to Nottoway

I describe the parallels I drew between the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 and the Nottoway Plantation fire this year, and compare the socioeconomic status of--and social attitudes towards--these buildings and what they represent.

The words I use in the recording may not match the words in the transcript.

Transcript

From Grenfell to Nottoway

Some time around the time I learned about Nottoway Plantation/Resort in Louisiana burning down, Netflix dropped a documentary titled 'Grenfell Uncovered,' and I drew parallels between Grenfell Tower and Nottoway Plantation, and society's attitudes towards each of these places and their residents (especially in the case of Grenfell Tower) before they burned down.

Grenfell Tower is (was) part of the Lancaster West (or Lancaster Road) Estate project, which was built as municipal housing as part of London's
slum clearances of the 1960s; it was a place built as part of a social-housing program, was neglected with very few fucks given--especially by those in power--and those powerful people didn't care until the building burnt down, and even those people are few and far between, with those responsible trying to avoid accountability. Four years before Grenfell Tower burned down in 2017, the Grenfell Action Group formed, and established a blog, on which it published ten warnings criticizing fire safety and maintenance issues at Grenfell Tower; clearly, these warnings and the issues the Grenfell Action Group spelled out were ignored, because the tower caught fire--which started with an electrical fault--killing 72 people, injuring more than 70, and 223 people escaped. The Grenfell Tower fire occurred because of a combination of government negligence, organizational incompetence, and corporate malfeasance.

The same trifecta didn't affect Nottoway Plantation: as a matter of fact, like all plantations, Nottoway was well-maintained, even when it was
repurposed into a resort. Nottoway Plantation was completed in 1859 for sugar baron John Hampden Randolph, who sent most of the sugar-making equipment to Texas when the United States Civil War broke out so the business could keep running, while his wife Emily and their younger children stayed behind. Nottoway later evolved into a resort, and remained so until it went up in flames in May of this year, after which controversy broke out: while quite a few black folks cheered, white folks--most of them living south of the Mason-Dixon line--publicly shit themselves, crying about their 'heritage' (the same line they used when statues of Confederate soldiers were taken down). Though all that remains of Nottoway Plantation/Resort is a small portion of its facade--with everything else (including anything having to do with its historical ties to slavery) reduced to ashes--its restaurant, Randolph's Restaurant, has reopened. Nottoway has been accused of whitewashing its history--glossing over the people who were enslaved there and their experiences, while advertising oak trees which were named after John Hampden Randolph's children. Oh, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)--a federal-government agency in the United States--is helping to investigate the cause of the fire.

There is a memorial to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire where the tower itself once stood, and survivors and others are still seeking justice for those who died, and trying to hold those responsible for the events leading up to the fire accountable for their roles in allowing it to happen. Meanwhile, parties are arguing about what Nottoway was supposed to be, and what it's supposed to represent--I've read quotes from people stating plantations can be teaching tools, depending on how they're run; however, most plantations are now used as venues for events such as weddings, while completely glossing over the history of chattel slavery at these places. When discussing plans to rebuild Nottoway, current owner William Dan Dyess said, “We need to move forward on a positive note and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice," thus vocalizing the attitude so many white people, especially those living in the southern United States, have towards facing the darker parts of their nation's history and doing anything to rectify it.

The parallels between Grenfell Tower and Nottoway Plantation/Resort point to issues of race and class; black people were enslaved at Nottoway, but the people who have run it to this day have insisted on whitewashing its history, and most of the people who have died in the Grenfell Tower fire were black, Latin American, and Middle Eastern, with few white folks among the dead. Everyone who lived--and those who died--in Grenfell Tower are/were working class, whereas Nottoway, like all plantations, is associated with wealth, power, prestige, and the oppression of people marked as 'other' (in this case, black people), and stands as a symbol of what bell hooks calls white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The purposes these buildings served led to people formulating their opinions and attitudes towards those places and the people associated with them, and how they respond and react to anything happening to or at those places and the people associated with them, which say more than anything else about society at large.

Sources:

Grenfell Action Group: https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/

www.netflix.com, 'Grenfell: Uncovered'

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40301289

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nottoway-plantation-fire-whitney-plantation-slavery-louisiana-rcna208281

https://www.yahoo.com/news/investigation-nottoway-plantation-fire-concluded-215231967.html

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/nottoway-louisiana-plantation-burned-rcna207810