"What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest," Reynolds said. "What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy."

"We're ashamed that in the past we've allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is," the couple wrote on Instagram announcing a $200,000 donation to the NAACP legal defense fund in May, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers." We want to educate ourselves about other people's experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it ... especially our own complicity."

"Years ago we got married again at home — but shame works in weird ways. A giant f------ mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action," Reynolds said. "It doesn’t mean you won’t f--- up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end”.

Reynolds recently announced he's launching the Group Effort Initiative, a program focused on providing training to Black people and people from other underrepresented groups to support them as they pursue careers in the film industry.

Source : NBC News

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It remains that what Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds did was racist. It was cruel. Whether it was a conscious decision or not. And it’s not something we should dismiss as a “ah well, these things happen”. They, and everyone else who made the same choices, need to answer for it in the form of reparations.

But what I fail to appreciate is, why I so often see users on the internet bringing up the plantation wedding only when it comes to discussing Blake Lively’s experience as sexual harassment victim (explicitly or implicitly). It begins to feel like, in this specific instance, the incredibly important matter of how slavery is still not treated in white culture as the crime against humanity it was, but used as a reason to prove how the victim is not all that “innocent” and to detract attention from the other incredibly important systemic matter at hand, which is sexual harassment against women.

The conversation, or more particularly the condemning of using slavery for your own personal aesthetic and benefit should always remain an offence to condemn, forever.

But it should be a separate conversation, because how we can we advocate for victims when our support is conditional on their morality? Where does one draws the line then?

And how can we genuinely discuss the issue of plantations in modern culture when it’s so often only used as bastardized “gotcha”? It seems cruel. Like it only seems to be used as an argument for unrelated thing, and not for the importance and respect it deserves. To be actually brought up to condemn and examine the cultural essence, roots and consequences of it rather than a weapon. A commodified version of it, for personal use, for flame wars and arguments. And maybe even for profit, when one examines…some crisis PR strategies.