Contesting Lanier’s lineage capitalizes on archives designed to destroy Black genealogy.

Evidence

Every day that Harvard maintains those positions compounds the injustices inflicted on Renty and Delia in its name, and further harms Ms. Lanier as their descendant and the rightful owner of images taken without their consent. … By denying Ms. Lanier’s superior claim to the daguerreotypes, Harvard is perpetuating the systematic subversion of black property rights that began during slavery and continued for a century thereafter. … And by contesting Ms. Lanier’s claim of lineage, Harvard is shamelessly capitalizing on an intentional damage done to Black Americans’ genealogy by a century’s worth of policies that forcefully separated families, erased slaves’ family names, withheld birth and death records, and criminalized literacy. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 1030

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The identification of Harvard’s genealogical challenge with the intentional archival destruction of Black family records (forced separation, name erasure, withheld records, criminalized literacy) is the paradigm-shifting insight unifying several threads.
• ADDENDUM: Directly support material for the articles on sacrifice and on trees-as-infrastructure: institutions preserving their own legitimacy by exploiting what they hold while denying the lineage of those who created it.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of understanding how archives were designed to prevent exactly the genealogy Lanier reconstructed.