http://www.nationalreview.com/article/354265/plantation-theory-kevin-d-williamson
Cornel West is a very smart man who has some very dumb opinions, but when he’s feeling froggy he can be a hoot. In a recent interview, Professor West mocked Al Sharpton for playing the odalisque in President Obama’s media seraglio, calling him the embodiment of the “rent-a-Negro phenomenon on MSNBC.” The Reverend Sharpton, he said, is constrained because “he’s still on the Obama plantation.”
The use of the word “plantation” to describe the relationship between black Americans and their political patrons is an unfortunate staple of contemporary rhetoric. Professor West’s remark is unusual in that “plantation” rhetoric usually comes from the Right, as in Star Parker’s Uncle Sam’s Plantation, Deneen Borelli’s Backlash: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation, remarks by Michelle Malkin (“a textbook example of plantation progressivism”) or Ann Coulter (“Democrats seem to have decided blacks are safely on the plantation”), Rush Limbaugh (“The libs run a plantation”) and the like. Joe Biden, because he is a despicable human being, drove straight past the plantation to the sanitarium when he told a largely black audience that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”
The plantation rhetoric is distasteful for the same reason that facile Nazi tropes should be verboten: Some instances of evil are unique, and using them as a handy cudgel in every disagreement dilutes their emotional potency. Hitler was Hitler, and nobody else is. The Reverend Sharpton is slavish, but he is not a slave. When black critics use plantation rhetoric, it is repugnant; when white critics use plantation rhetoric, it is repugnant and condescending.