On Delicious Forgetting and Being Invited In

When I’ve told the story about my cousin’s wedding on a plantation to other Black people, the first question (always asked about the bride) is, “Is she?…”

Yes, she is.

My cousin, Afro-Puerto Rican, like me, married someone white and their gorgeous celebration was hosted on a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. The lovers were married right along a river bend, once home to rice paddies, and the reception partially took place inside a remodeled barn that was once central to the labor an enslaved population performed there.

Huge oak trees framed the ceremony, their branches heavy with Spanish moss that lifted and fell with the breeze. Their guests gathered on white wooden folding chairs arranged on a manicured lawn. There were satin tablecloths, linen programs, and a bar set up near the water. Everything was tasteful, neutral, and green accents used throughout the decor complemented the sage-hued clumps of tree moss. The river looked calm in the late afternoon light, its surface sometimes catching gold and in that warm light, it was easy to be lulled by the scene.

If you’ve ever met even just one Puerto Rican, then you’ll understand that their wedding included several nods to Puerto Rico: small flags lining the buffet table, a plena performance, and a DJ set that was primarily Bad Bunny. The music carried across the grounds, ricocheting off the trees and open air, folding Caribbean rhythms into Southern humidity. As with many weddings, this one featured a small memorial table with photos of those who could not attend because they had passed. Among them was a photo of my paternal grandfather, a Black Puerto Rican whose grandparents on both sides had once been enslaved on the former sugarcane fields of Caguas. In the towns where my family has roots (Caguas and her sister city, Gurabo), the afterlives of plantation labor remain materially present: the brick ruins of former sugar refineries still stand visible from PR-30. My Títí Wanda remembers that even into the 1960s, older people in town still spoke fragments of an African-derived Spanish dialect, sometimes called Loíza Spanish, which was passed down across generations. Throughout the night (and even now, months later), I struggled with what it meant for my grandfather’s photo to sit on that table, on a plantation.

To be honest, my grandfather likely would have approved. Not only because he would have appreciated being remembered at their celebration, but also because he was a proponent of mejorar la raza or “bettering the race,” the eugenicist belief commonplace among some Puerto Ricans even today that proximity to whiteness is synonymous with improvement, refinement, and progress. All three of my abuelo’s children began their adult romantic lives with Black or Brown spouses and eventually partnered (through second marriages, or in my uncle’s case, a fourth) with someone white. Internalized racism is one of colonialism’s most efficient afterlives, and my grandfather’s approval, whether imagined or real, is a part of that machinery. What makes this logic so durable is that it often arrives disguised as love, pragmatism, or protection. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, the idea of mejorar la raza taught generations of Black and mixed-race families that whitening the family line could improve their children’s chances at safety and economic mobility. The idea forms part of the psychic architecture beneath plantation weddings, sustained by a world where proximity to whiteness still promises a measure of safety from the violence white supremacy produces.

In the time since the wedding, the Trump administration’s brutal assault on immigrant communities has only accelerated. In the wake of the extrajudicial murders of Minnesota protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti, my cousin’s wife posted about how much of the violence, division, and hatred we see online is manufactured to make us turn on one another and distract us from the real work of holding those in power accountable. While white supremacist violence is “as American as apple pie,” we do live in a world where, for better or worse, we must contend with the erosion of plausible deniability. Before social media, many of us could still imagine that the people we loved or lived beside were less invested in racial hierarchy than they truly were. Now their politics arrive unprompted, delivered as we scroll between baby photos and vacation updates.

To my new cousin-in-law’s credit, calls like hers are often framed as generous because they seem to gesture toward unity and toward a moral high ground where everyone can gather if we would only stop insisting on our differences. Yet it is difficult for me to receive such appeals graciously when she and her family are Trump supporters. So much a part of the culture war are they that, despite growing up in Washington State, one of her brothers attended the wedding in what I can only generously describe as cowboy cosplay and, during his toast, mentioned how much he loved the Second Amendment—apropos of nothing in particular and delivered with the confidence of someone expecting rapturous applause.

Electoral politics aside, calls for unity like hers depend on the oppressed agreeing, at least temporarily, to suspend history and power, and to accept that the cost of this suspension will never be distributed equally. As I sensed that night in Charleston, violence does not disappear simply because we find ourselves gathering in a place that is beautiful. In the case of the nuptials in question, beauty reworked violence into something easier to inhabit, something almost inviting. That evening, string lights glistened over blood-soaked soil and bouquets of calla lilies and garden roses perfumed the remodeled barn, obscuring the labor history embedded in its beams and foundation. That we could momentarily forget that this venue was a site of terror doesn’t negate the violence that happened there, but signals that perhaps we were comfortable metabolizing that violence.

I still feel haunted by the proximity of symbols we had agreed, for this night, to treat as compatible rather than historically unbearable. For example, a plena ensemble performed live beside the plantation’s Big House even though, for much of its history, plena was stigmatized as vulgar (read: Black) music in the Hispanophone Caribbean because of its association with poor and working-class Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, criminality, rebellion, and “moral disorder.” Throughout the evening, the DJ played songs from Bad Bunny’s most recent album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a record many Puerto Ricans understand as anti-colonial, preoccupied with displacement and loss, and critical of tourism. Those songs echoed across a landscape shaped by enslaved labor while wedding guests toasted their champagne flutes and danced with their arms raised above their heads nearby. My grandfather’s smiling face watched over the scene from the memorial table.

I find the grammars of white supremacy boring and muddled. White supremacy requires a remarkable suspension of disbelief that borders on fantastical thinking. The so-called “superior race” can barely withstand direct sunlight and has accelerated a climate catastrophe that threatens everyone, including itself. But the benefit of white supremacy is that it does not rely on coherence but survives through repetition of the myth and becomes something so familiar that even its most grotesque ideas can become banal. The plantation wedding is one expression of this logic wherein the historical context of the space loses its sharp edges and now defanged, is embraced as an aesthetic and romantic backdrop.

Let’s be real: forgetting is seductive and promises a path toward our mutual comfort. Viewed through the vampiric logic of white supremacy, even mejorar la raza seems to glimmer with hope, and whitening your family line becomes, for some, an attempt to lessen the bite by moving closer to the source. Like repetition, white supremacy feeds on this hope. It, of course, survives by terror, but so, too, through romance, civility, aspiration, and the desire to believe that proximity to power offers protection from being consumed by it.

In her calls for love and unity in lieu of accountability (paired with her choice of wedding venue) my cousin-in-law’s plea reminded me of the character, Remmick, from Ryan Coogler’s 2025 Southern Gothic film, Sinners. In Sinners, Coogler outlines the trap of white supremacy disguised as unity with merciless clarity: white supremacy arrives in two forms, one which plays the fiddle by the door and asks to be invited in, offering the patrons of Club Juke a place in a harmonious familial structure. The other form: a raid. The vampire trio in Sinners understands what white supremacy has always known: domination lasts longer when it feels chosen. In Sinners, as in the interracial plantation wedding, this appeal is seductive precisely because it frames violence as misunderstanding (perhaps even as romance!) and power as abstraction.

There is one more image that continues to strike me as I think back on the wedding: a hand-painted sign which proclaimed, “Love actually is all around.” The sign seemed freshly painted ahead of the festivities and the red lettering seemed to drip from the canvas like blood. What is love that asks nothing of power? At the end of the night, as we walked from the wedding’s manicured lawn to the parking lot, another sign indicated that if one followed the marsh, you would arrive at the former “slave cabins.”

That night, I dreamed my cousin was going to be cannibalized, and we had to prepare to save his life from a bloodthirsty cabal. Only hours earlier, we had been licking white cake frosting from the corners of mouths beneath all that Spanish moss. In the warm glow of the candles placed around the dinner tables, some of the shadows cast by the hairy clumps of moss looked like bodies swaying in the wind.

There is a cost to so much delicious forgetting. Forgetting, too, hungers.