[deleted] OP t1_irxxvh4 wrote on October 11, 2022 at 9:23 PM

Reply to comment by outb0undflight in What's your opinion on renaming Plantation Street because it's racist? by [deleted]

Your argument is weird. The name Plantation Street is bad because it is connected to the people who founded this country, since it was created by people who founded the country, and even though it's not referring to a slave plantation, it was named by people who could have had slaves, so it's therefore a slavery-reminiscent name?

Also, we did "extricate the word 'Plantation' in America from the practice of slavery." Every single day, thousands of people in this city alone use the word "plantation" without thinking of anything aside from a street that runs from Rice Square past Lincoln Plaza to Northeast Cutoff.

outb0undflight t1_iry0nk8 wrote on October 11, 2022 at 9:42 PM

No? That's literally not my argument. It has nothing to do with who named the street, it's that in the United States the word "plantation" is inextricably linked to the Atlantic Slave Trade. This is not a question. The majority of Africans taken from Africa ended up on Sugar Cane plantations in the Carribean. The majority of Slaves in America ended up on cash crop plantations in the South. The slave trade picked up and expanded specifically because these plantations needed labor. They only started to use paid labor when they ran out of slaves to use. Even if you want to argue that some people within the plantation economy system didn't use slaves, the vast, vast majority of them did. Are you starting to see a link between the word plantation and slavery?

[deleted] OP t1_iry36yg wrote on October 11, 2022 at 10:00 PM

Before the 1800s, when the name was first applied, a plantation was just some kind of farm-type area. "Plantation" was used before anyone even permanently settled here, so there is absolutely no relation to slavery. That name came into being before the whole Southern plantation system started. We're not talking about Robert E. Lee Road. We're talking about a street whose name can be interpreted as something tangential to slavery if you stop and think about it and if you want to and if you aren't completely honest. It's not a racist street name. It's not a name that anyone has taken issue with. It's some some bureaucrats looking to justify their role at the medical school. Worcester has a Black community that has never raised this as an issue, ever. It took paid (highly paid) diversity consultants to come and tell us our street name is a problem.

You know what was also linked to slavery? Cotton. Shall we get rid of that term as well? Should the school send its consultant to Leominster to demand that they change the name of Cotton Street? Should they go to Sturbridge and demand that the name of the Cotton Mills Dam be changed? I mean, that's more directly related to slavery, since the cotton mill it's named after opened in the antebellum period and, you know, was a cotton mill.

Ikirio t1_iry4bh3 wrote on October 11, 2022 at 10:08 PM

And to add..... UMASSMED doesnt pay its post-docs or graduate students well. We all just got a raise because after a review the school realized we were paid so shit that it was actually illegal by MASS equal pay laws and they wanted to get ahead of it before we caught on.

They are paying a consultant/DIG officer at least 100K plus staff for their office and building etc so that they can virtue signal about shit that has no impact on a fucking single person while engaging in some of the worst anti-labor shit. Its a bunch of horse shit.

[deleted] OP t1_irybt6k wrote on October 11, 2022 at 11:06 PM

Sort of like, "Hey, look at this shiny quarter over here..."