The Hard Work of Forgetting: The Black Family Home and the Two Sides of American Memory

We stayed at houses for long weekends, gathered at houses for special occasions, and frequently dropped by these houses on weekends, just because. We played, got into trouble, and learned in these houses. We are who we are, in part, because the culture of these houses, represented through their design, instilled in us a sense of memory.

While our childhoods were not unique, homeownership is not a common experience for the majority of Black Americans. Not every home is a house, and not every house a home. Home is a feeling that can be created nearly anywhere, conjured more from who and what is in a space than from the space itself. But it can also be taken away, replaced with persistent discomfort and the sense that you are somewhere you do not belong or are not wanted—a place that has no memory of you, that does not recognize you as central to its narrative. America perpetuates this feeling through instances of overt racism it enacts on its Black citizens and through the quieter misrecognitions, assumptions, and aggressions in between. In such moments, the memory of home is an invaluable reminder of who we are, braced against the weight of social prescriptions of who we can be. And in the dissonance of the dialectic between what we remember and how we are remembered, structures appear, woven into the fabric of our nation, illustrating a deep connection among homeownership, the feeling of home, and the various uses of memory.[1]

The Black family home is a place that stands at the intersection of two distinct types of memory: America’s collective memory and the individual memories of Black homeowners and families. In America’s collective memory, the Black family home is mostly omitted—an erasure created and sustained by various mechanisms including the constructs we term “common knowledge,” “the myth of happenstance,” and “the hard work of forgetting.”[2] But the social injustice of the Black family home in America serves primarily to justify and normalize the economic injustice of it, with the dramatic gap in homeownership between America’s Black and white households making up a significant part of the massive wealth disparity separating the two.

[NOTES]

[1] See Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

[2] Common knowledge, a term developed by Bryan Mason, is a reflexive form of collective memory—the things that we know are true without our having to know exactly how or why, including misrecognitions and stereotypes.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)