White family wealth derived from slavery is routinely erased and misremembered

Evidence

Anita rewrote her family’s history by ignoring the fact that her great-grandmother, Margaret Barber, was an enslaver. While her days might have been fabulous, you know who did not live a fabulous life? Her enslaved workers. Anita didn’t even bother to mention them. Yet her grandmother’s wealth was possible only because of unpaid enslaved labor. The crystal chandeliers, multiple ballrooms, and gilded mirrors were all paid for with profits earned from the system of slavery. Anita also misremembered her great-grandmother being forced to sell the property; in reality, Margaret was the one who proposed the sale of her land to the federal government, from which she benefited immensely (although her son thought she sold it for too little). — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 464

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of the ‘hidden history’ pillar of Brown’s three-part reparations argument introduced in the intro; also connect to her prior book The Whiteness of Wealth on how family financial narratives get laundered.
• CANDY: The concrete grotesque detail — gilded mirrors and ballrooms bought by enslaved labor, and the descendant reframing sale as forced when ancestor initiated and profited — is a sharp, quotable instance of historical erasure.