It depends on how it is used. A phrase like “Go back to the plantation.” said to an African-American is clearly a racial insult.
OTOH, merely saying “That’s a pretty plantation over there.” isn’t.
Context means a lot. Just look at the word “boy”.
The term itself just describes a place. Just like the term slavery describes a condition.
The terms aren’t politically incorrect. Saying that the things those terms describe are desirable is incorrect.
I don’t know. Did slaves work on farms?
There’s a particular type of architectural style in the US called “plantation house”. It’s just a big, cubic shaped mansion with columns and surrounded by a bunch of land. There are “farm houses” too, but they’re smaller and more humble. Like the one Lassie and Timmy lived in.
I agree with others that the term applies to large scale farms, usually with one crop rather than several or a rotation, and usually with large numbers of hired (or sometimes enslaved) workers rather than owner-operated. It’s also a term that brings to mind unsophisticated techniques or technology. No matter how big, how mono-crop, or how many laborers a large scale modern corporate farm employs, I wouldn’t consider it a plantation because of all the tractors, trucks and combines. But if you’ve got hundreds of guys with machetes harvesting your bananas by hand, it’s a plantation.
And of course slaves worked on farms as well as plantations. There’s a large connotation of “plantation” that implies slavery, at least in the US. Because lots of farms didn’t have slaves, but almost all US plantations had slaves. But you can say the same about cotton, and we don’t consider people racist for buying cotton clothes or mentioning the name of the fabric. Yeah, if you say “go pick some cotton”, it’s politically incorrect, but the word itself isn’t. Same goes for “plantation”.
What is a story about one idiot supposed to show? If a raw cotton display were placed on a table at a dinner for black students as at the end of that story, that’s another matter - that’s the whole point, context matters. There’s also a youtube video of an idiot (who holds a position in state government, I believe) who thinks that the term “black hole” is racist.
My Mother’s family in Southern Georgia would say that a plantation has some non-zero percentage of perennial crops. Whereas the farm may be planting new crops
But I don’t know if that’s only regional usage or even less.
For some reason, you hear about cattle ranches, horse ranches, and sheep ranches, but you never hear about pig ranches. I guess that’s because ranch implies “lots of room for animals to graze around” and pigs don’t need a lot of room to graze around.
As for the word “plantation”, when I see it I think “estate.” It has connotations of a huge house and gardens occupied by the owner’s family, with servants or slaves attending to them, and a vast expanse of agricultural land surrounding it. A farm can be big or small, but a plantation can only be big, at least the way I envision it.