Photos of the couple's 2012 nuptials at the Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston will never be seen on wedding sites like The Knot and Pinterest because they are no longer featuring weddings that took place at plantations.
- Dec 7, 2019
AceShowbiz - Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively may have multiple times set a couple goal, but their wedding is not so much of a good inspiration, at least not according to several online wedding-planning platforms. Photos of the couple's 2012 nuptials at the Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston are banned from some prominent sites like Pinterest and The Knot.
This decision is not due to a personal reason, though. Those sites ban Ryan and Blake's wedding pictures because they no longer feature weddings that took place at plantations. The move, which has drawn both praise and outcry from public, is made due to the controversy surrounding past human labor issue at plantations.
Plantations in the south are largely known for using slave labor to cultivate coffee, cotton, sugar and other items for the profit of the white landowners and their families. As the civil rights group Color of Change points out, "Plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen."
"The decision to glorify plantations as nostalgic sites of celebration is not an empowering one for the Black women and justice-minded people who use your site," the organization wrote in a letter to the Knot Worldwide executives, as well as Pinterest. "The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry."
As for the Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston where Ryan and Blake wed, it used hundreds of African American slaves to produce bricks and harvest pecans, as well as peaches.
The Knot Worldwide is currently working on new guidelines to ensure wedding vendors on their websites don't use language that glorifies, celebrates, or romanticizes Southern plantation history. Chief marketing officer of the company, Dhanusha Sivajee, tells Buzzfeed News that the new guidelines are meant to ensure that wedding vendors aren't referring to a history that includes slavery using language such as "elegant" or "charming."
