US policies deliberately sabotaged Black genealogy by erasing names and records

Evidence

“And by contesting your claim of lineage, Harvard is shamelessly capitalizing on the intentional damage done to Black Americans’ genealogy by a century’s worth of policies that forcibly separated families, erased enslaved family names, withheld birth and death records, and criminalized literacy,” he said, with emphasis on forcibly, erased, and criminalized, as I nodded along. He understood. He got it. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 788

Categorization

• XREF: Directly describes the archival obstruction Lanier had to reconstruct against — connects to the reader’s interest in genealogy built against archives designed to prevent it (Saidiya Hartman’s archives of the enslaved).