Have you ever noticed that during any conversation about racism, someone will inevitably say that “no one alive today was a slave” or that “segregation ended a long time ago—get over it!” It’s a pretty common response to assertions about the impact of racism. When someone says that, all that is being asserted is that history does not matter...and we all know that isn’t true. This is a form of erasure called “decontextualizing” which, in the case of racism, seeks to remove a topic from its proper historical framing.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that, yes, no one alive today was a slave and that segregation ended before I was born in 1982. The implication here, however, is that both slavery and segregation are ancient history. No, I personally did not know any slaves. My grandfather, however, born in 1916, did. So if we are being honest, the living memory of knowing older people who had been the property of other people is just starting to fade from living memory with the passing of the World War II generation.