Scholarly evidentiary standards could annul an ancestor’s living testimony

Evidence

Overall, she said that I had to prove the connection between my great-grandfather Renty Taylor Thompson and the man known as Congo Renty in the daguerreotypes. While I knew that I had my work cut out for me, I was also struck by what felt like academic arrogance. It felt so dismissive, suggesting that scholarly research could annul ancestral accounts. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 266

Categorization

• XREF: This is the crux of her case against Harvard and contrasts with how universities treat archives: ancestral oral history pitted against written documentary evidence. — connects to: Criticism and archives must be judged by universal evidentiary standards, not authorial identity — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1046