I love when the left gets a taste of their own medicine.

Via WaPo:

Which celebrities were accused of being racist while you were spending time with your family this holiday season? That would be feminist icon Ani DiFranco and Roots drummer/”Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” bandleader Questlove, perhaps some of the last people you’d expect to make (and then walk back!) racially insensitive comments over the holidays.

DiFranco came under fire after announcing a four-day creative workshop called the “Righteous Retreat” which was to be held, rather unrighteously, at a former slave plantation outside of New Orleans. She later explained in a Facebook post cancelling the event that an organizer had approached her before the venue was set; she then veers into a long, touchy-feely discussion on the power of healing:

tragedies on a massive scale are not easily dealt with or recovered from. i certainly in no way expect or want to be immune from that pain or that process of recovery. i welcome (and in fact have always pursued) constructive dialogue about these and all political/social issues. my intention of going ahead with the conference at the nottoway plantation was not to be a part of a great forgetting but it’s opposite.

i know that pain is stored in places where great social ills have occurred. i believe that people must go to those places with awareness and with compassionate energy and meditate on what has happened and absorb some of the reverberating pain with their attention and their awareness. i believe that compassionate energy is transformative and necessary for healing the wounds of history … i obviously underestimated the power of an evocatively symbolic place to trigger collective and individual pain.

Unfortunately, DiFranco’s insistence that she isn’t part of a “great forgetting” is perhaps undermined by the fact that Nottoway Plantation’s Web site goes to pretty great lengths to romanticize its slave-keeping past — at one point characterizing its slaves as a “willing workforce” who were “well treated for the time.” (The venue also hosts weddings, corporate meetings and other events; those presumably are not the subject of Change.org petitions.)