Last Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that online platforms, including Pinterest and the Knot Worldwide, would restrict content that features or romanticizes weddings held on former slave plantations. These changes were the result of a campaign by the social justice organization Color of Change. In a letter, Color of Change wrote that “plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen. The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry.”

Color of Change posted the news on Facebook, where it was, of course, received with appropriate empathy and contemplation. The 600 comments included lots of gems such as “Proud of our civil war plantation wedding! Eat shit color of change [sic]!!” because one exclamation point wasn’t enough. There was the old-faithful “slavery was too long ago” argument, with one commenter adding, “So stupid. That was hundreds of years ago. Why not call them beautiful homes or restored homes. Are they canceling castle weddings too?” And the unheard-of sentiment: “There were slaves of every color.”

The basic themes were echoed by the wedding vendors quoted in news reports: that slavery was in the past, that it wasn’t that bad, that the splendor of plantations has outlived whatever negativity they might represent. While these pronouncements can be easily countered with reason, logic unfortunately doesn’t matter.

Slavery was indeed “in the past” – a shocker to readers, I’m sure. Yet this hasn’t prevented America from fervently preserving the history it does deem worthwhile, no matter how far back or inconsequential. Many Americans zealously defend their right to praise the Confederate flag, defend inanimate buildings from demolition or restoration (have you seen the passion among landmark preservationists?), and, yes, scroll endlessly through plantation-inspo, with none of the icky historical context.

It’s not just about the maintenance of white power structures, but the prioritization of white Americans’ feelings and experiences

Historical texts, news articles and academic research are all available for anyone genuinely interested in examining slavery’s brutality, which was often most severe in the deep south states where slave-owners built plantation mansions. If anything, the cruelty of the institution has been underestimated. Southern school districts are known to issue textbooks reducing enslaved black men, women and children to mere “workers” – rather than what they were: forced laborers who often lived in perpetual terror and were sold as property with no human rights.

There’s also the persistent trope that black people were happy slaves. But most African Americans don’t find much joy in seeing plantations glorified and their human histories deemed a niggling inconvenience.

For people committed to this narrative, however, facts don’t matter. That their feelings are regularly given such credence reveals one end of America’s white supremacist spectrum. While we tend to associate white supremacy with reactionary violence and alt-right trolls, it also lives in more subtler spaces. It’s not just about the maintenance of white power structures, but the prioritization of white Americans’ feelings and experiences.

These are the same feelings that have discounted black oppression in every era of black American life. In 1964, just a few months after the Civil Rights Act was passed and its effects were yet to be seen, a majority of white New Yorkers polled by the New York Times felt that the civil rights movement had gone too far. While the Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act had yet to be passed, claims of “reverse discrimination” already abounded.

Today, plenty of people still claim that the Confederacy had nothing to do with hatred, and was a movement founded for personal freedom and “states’ rights”. Similarly, discrimination against black consumers and homeowners wasn’t about subjugation, but asserting one’s private rights without government interference.

The same logic guides the people who apparently believe that wedding websites restricting plantation content is an affront to the abstract rights of white Americans. White people being told what to do, even in theory, is a problem.

Many white Americans insist that they had no role in slavery and that it was “so long ago”. Yet they seem quite adamant about defending it. Of course, denying black Americans’ pain – and preserving and normalizing the symbols of black subjugation – is just as American as slavery itself.