Beneficiaries’ memoirs erase the enslaved people whose labor funded their wealth.

Evidence

Anita rewrote her family’s history by ignoring the fact that her great-grandmother, Margaret Barber, was an enslaver. While her days might have been fabulous, you know who did not live a fabulous life? Her enslaved workers. Anita didn’t even bother to mention them. Yet her grandmother’s wealth was possible only because of unpaid enslaved labor. The crystal chandeliers, multiple ballrooms, and gilded mirrors were all paid for with profits earned from the system of slavery. Anita also misremembered her great-grandmother being forced to sell the property; in reality, Margaret was the one who proposed the sale of her land to the federal government, from which she benefited immensely (although her son thought she sold it for too little). — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 464

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘who tells the story matters’ epistemology connects directly to the Whiteness of Wealth’s earlier critique of how standard economics narrates wealth. — connects to: Settler values made white authors habitually erase black labor and humanity. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 51
• STORYSTEM: A novel’s narrator compiling a family history and uncovering that their ancestor’s grandeur rested on enslaved labor would dramatize this exact memory-silencing.