“Tourists Visit Plantation in Brazil and are Served by Black ‘Slaves’”, 6 December 2016

…The Paraíba valley of Rio de Janeiro state...,...enriched by the exploitation of slave labor on coffee plantations,...known for the...brutality with...slaves...[,]...[is]...on the state’s cultural map..., advertising...tourism that glorifies its past...naturalizing racism and slavery. If, in...2016, you would like to be served by a black person dressed as a slave, you can visit, for example, the Santa Eufrásia Plantation...Constructed around 1830...in the Vale do Café, or Coffee Valley, it is the only private plantation protected by Rio de Janeiro’s Institute of National Historic and Artistic Patrimony (Iphan-RJ). The property...was purchased by Colonel Horácio José de Lemos, whose descendants still own the property...When tourists...visit places like the Holocaust Museum in Berlin...they are moved by the pain suffered by the Jewish people who were enslaved and massacred by the Nazis. They cry, become ill, and express their outrage on social media...[But they]...are shielded from the horrors of slavery when they visit a plantation like this one, where they listen to an intimate concert,...served by people dressed as slaves and guided by the plantation’s mistresses...without any critical perspective...“Racism?...Because I dress as a plantation mistress and I have a house slave who dresses as a house slave? What are you talking about?! No! I don’t do anything racist here!”“I usually have a house slave, but she ran...into the woods. I sent the slave catcher after her, but she didn’t come back…When I want to grab a dress, I say: ‘two slaves, please!’...” It sounds like 1880, but...the phrase was uttered by Elizabeth Dolson,...great-granddaughters of Col. Lemos and...owner of the...[farm]...She receives tourists on her land and introduces herself as if she were a plantation mistress...[in]...the slavery era...Diadorim Ideia, a communications firm that developed Rio de Janeiro’s Culture Map in partnership with the State Secretariat for Culture, informed...that the Santa Eufrásia Plantation had been removed from the map...[as it]...“is being associated with practices with which we vehemently disagree.”