Slavery heritage representations, cultural citizenship, and judicial politics in America

Former slave plantations that are currently heritage sites or plantation museums in America have been criticized for their frequent use of non inclusive representational strategies. Such strategies usually annihilate, trivialize, or marginalize the contributions of African Americans to these heritage sites and rarely include them in their master narratives. Discourses on cultural citizenship help policy makers frame their understanding of the past; and race-based judicial cases provide an explanatory model for the dominant society's resistance to the political rights of marginalized groups. Since such legal cases are a metonymic representation of the will of the majority, they, in a way, expose the mind of the dominant society. Cultural citizenship studies is mostly concerned with the symbolic aspects of a society, such as whose history is taught in schools or represented within national heritage sites.