The diaTribe Team Visits Whitney Museum, First Slavery Museum in US

By Kelly Close, Alasdair Wilkins, Shivani Chandrashekaran, and Ava Runge

Given that this plantation and all others like it were dedicated to sugar, the connection to diabetes is especially stark.

While we were at the ADA Scientific Sessions in New Orleans earlier this month, our team visited the Whitney Plantation, the first and only plantation museum in the United States dedicated to slavery and the stories of enslaved people. Our remarkable tour guide Mr. Ali Johnson led us through the plantation grounds and memorials. Like all Whitney Plantation tour guides, he gave us a unique tour shaped by his own perspective on what the Whitney represents. Here are diaTribe Founder Kelly Close’s opening comments to our walk through this incredible museum.

Mr. Johnson shared that when a friend of his suggested that he work at the country’s first slavery museum, he told her no. The very idea of working at a plantation, a place where Mr. Johnson could have been held in bondage if he had been born two centuries earlier, sounded preposterous, even offensive. Mr. Johnson's perspective changed when a close friend was tragically murdered. He and his friend’s attempts to work through their grief over a senseless death finally convinced him to visit the Whitney, where he instantly recognized he had found something: “I took the tour and I went straight into the visitor center and got an application. And I’ve been here ever since.”

For the past year, Mr. Johnson has been one of several guides taking groups like ours on tours of the plantation. “This is my way of paying reparations,” explained Mr. Johnson, elaborating that to him, reparations don't necessarily mean money to be paid, but rather any way of healing the centuries worth of damage the country's black community has endured. He sees knowledge as the best way to start paying off that debt, and believes that learning the story of the Whitney can help young people understand the deep origins of issues they face today. “It’s a lot of things in our society,” he pointed out, “that are perpetuated from policies that were put in place during this time.” 

Last year marked 150 years since the end of the Civil War, and it can be tempting to think that slavery in the United States is a relic of an increasingly distant past. On several counts, this is far from the case. First, 150 years isn’t nearly as long ago as we might like to think. Central to the Whitney Plantation’s story are the slave narratives compiled in the late 1930s as part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project. Interviewers spoke with 2,300 elderly men and women who had been emancipated as children and young adults seven decades prior. Those former slaves could have told their stories to children who are still alive today. One person who would be old enough to have been able hear such stories firsthand is John Cummings, the 78-year-old white New Orleans civil rights lawyer who has spent millions of his own fortune to make the Whitney Plantation a reality. It only takes two lifetimes to bring us back to the time of slavery.

But even then, we’re only talking about slavery in one sense of the word. Mr. Johnson stressed during the tour that the Whitney was a working sugarcane plantation until the 1970s, as sharecropping and Jim Crow laws held black people in what was slavery in all but name. For those interested in further understanding the effective re-enslavement of those the Civil War supposedly freed, Mr. Johnson recommended Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Slavery by Another Name.” Those looking for a (relatively) shorter introduction to some of the same territory would do well to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s now famous June 2014 cover story in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.”

Still, as important as those stories are to understanding America’s racial history, there’s nothing quite like actually walking the grounds of a former plantation. “It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and have somebody give you a textbook and say this happened, that happened, and they did this,” Mr. Johnson said. “But when you come here and you see actual things, you see an actual church built by former slaves who were illiterate. You can see an actual slave jail where they locked people in while they waited to sell them like property. You can see actual detached kitchens, actual slave cabins and how these people were forced to live, it makes it so much realer.”

Mr. Johnson said he doesn’t point fingers at any particular groups in his tours, for he feels all groups share some degree of complicity for the atrocities of slavery — countries around the world bought the sugar produced by slaves, and it was well known where this product came from and how it was farmed. Of course, this is not to minimize the obvious, overriding culpability of white people as the architects and perpetrators of slavery in the United States. But Mr. Johnson’s point is important in remembering that the story of the Whitney Plantation is a specific, terrible example of all humanity’s capacity for inhumanity. To Mr. Johnson, the plantation and slavery as a whole represented centuries of wasted potential, centuries spent building a warped, toxic society on hate and fear. “Just imagine if they had spent those three to four hundred years loving each other and putting their heads together on how to make our country great. So we have a lot of lost time, a lot of lost expended energy for nothing. It’s going to take a lot more expended energy to overturn those things that all that negative energy put into our society.”

Today, the legacies of slavery loom large — economic, social, political, environmental, just to name a few. During the tour, we reflected on the racial disparities of chronic conditions such as diabetes and obesity, which disproportionately impact communities of color. In fact, black Americans are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes as their white counterparts. Similarly, they are more likely to suffer complications, be hospitalized for diabetes, and die from diabetes, and are also less likely to have access to nutritional foods, adequate healthcare, and representation in clinical trials. Healthcare is just one of the many institutions in which the remnants of slavery continue to disadvantage black Americans, but it is a significant one that affects lives every day. Slavery and its successor systems helped create the massive income inequality, divides in living conditions and healthcare access, and all the myriad other factors both large and small that underpin these disparities.

Visiting the Whitney plantation was a moving, thought-provoking, and life-changing experience for all of us on The diaTribe Foundation team. Our experience on the plantation grounds and memorials gave us the chance to learn about and reflect on a dark, ugly truth that is far too often ignored, tabooed, and dismissed. It is uncomfortable to confront the brutalities and human rights violations of just 150 years ago, but if we want to create a better future it is critical to acknowledge and understand how this past shapes all aspects of the present.