Alissa Rae Funderburk and Fanny Garcia wrote this paper for the Oral History Association’s Assessing the Role of Race and Power in Oral History Theory and Practice Symposium in June 2022. The symposium, organized by an ad hoc group of historians in collaboration with the Oral History Association and the Oral History Center at the University of California Berkeley, builds upon the question “Is Oral History White?” to interrogate broader structures and dynamics of race, racialized thinking, and institutional power in oral history. This paper was presented in the session Oral History and Reparations alongside:

“‘You don’t know the whole story’: Toward a Reparative, Antiracist Archive of Racial Terror Lynching in Maryland” by Charles Chavis, Jr., George Mason University and Jack Del Nunzio, the Carroll County Coalition of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project

“The Doris Duke Native Revitalization Project: The Possibilities and the Limits of Reparative Description” and Kate Stewart and Brooke Blizzard, The Doris Duke Native Oral History Revitalization Project at the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona