Marginalizing Black perspectives serves to hide slavery’s founding role from national memory

Evidence

This is why the memories and perspectives of Black Americans have so often been marginalized and erased from the larger narrative of this nation: we are the stark reminders of some of its most damning truths. Eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom. Our nation obscures and diminishes this history because it shames us. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 64

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the specific contested empirical claim (8 in 10 stat) that historians challenged in the Wilentz letter — central to the reader’s case-study goal.