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Three Racially-Charged Terms That Need To Be Eliminated In Real Estate Listings

From Plantation Shutters to Butler’s Pantries: The need for more inclusive, less insensitive language in real estate

Rod T. Faulkner
4 min readMay 28, 2024
Image credit: Andy Dean Photography via Shutterstock.com

African Americans know very well the destructive power words can possess; slurs and coded terms created to marginalize, dehumanize, and humiliate us.

Recently, I collided with this reality while I was perusing real estate listings for houses.

After scanning through photographs of gorgeous single-family residences, I began to notice three specific, racially-loaded terms popping up frequently in the descriptions of these homes.

Three terms that, as an African American, immediately elicit visceral feelings of disdain and offense.

These three words hearken back to the antebellum South and the atrocities of chattel slavery.

They are antiquated, racially insensitive, and have no place being used today-especially in any commercial context.

“Plantation” Shutters

Plantations were enforced labor camps for the enslaved.

Period.

Rod T. Faulkner
Rod T. Faulkner

Written by Rod T. Faulkner

Proud Blerd. I write about sci-fi, fantasy, and other areas of interest. Founder of EYE ON SCI-FI Podcast. https://bio.site/eyeonscifi Chocolate lover.

Responses (7)

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I hate to say it, but these racist holdover terms probably persist for the same reason statues of Confederate "heroes" and schools and landmarks named after the same still persist: because some white people still look back fondly upon the nightmare…

17

Real estate itself is still fraught with racism. I’ve written about my experiences here but I know not much has changed:

https://medium.com/fourth-wave/its-2024-let-s-cut-the-model-minority-and-white-adjacent-bs-2fe68cef2506

3

I'm sure with deeper investigation, we can find more inequities in real estate parlance. "Suburban" reminds me of the fact that the suburbs were created for white people who migrated from the cities in an effort to separate themselves from the…

1