Genealogical knowledge is a racial privilege that enslavement systems denied to Black families

Evidence

It was Eli’s idea to take this a step further, into the public realm, by writing a letter to Harvard—and to make a poster of both our families’ genealogical trees, presented side by side to make clear that slavery was designed to break Black families apart. When he sent it to me, I was again blown away. He called it Family Photos, and whereas the Agassiz descendants were populated with dozens of easily obtained photographs of his ancestors, beginning with Louis Agassiz on one side and Papa Renty on the other, my family tree was sparse. … “What we as white people take for granted, knowing who our ancestors are, is a privilege,” Eli said. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 883

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated interest in how archives were designed to prevent genealogical reconstruction — this visualizes that abstract point concretely. — connects to: Founding myths silently bury inconvenient facts of shared ancestry — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 73
• SEED: The side-by-side family tree poster as visual evidence of archival asymmetry is a striking artifact an essay could describe.