M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong!" is the most celebrated example of erasure poetics in the African American diaspora tradition, working with the legal decision in the Zong massacre case by erasing most of its language to excavate the silenced voices of the 150 enslaved people thrown overboard; A student practising erasure poetics might work with a plantation record book, a Jim Crow-era newspaper, or a police report, removing language to reveal the human reality that official documentation suppressed or distorted; Tyehimba Jess's "Olio" uses erasure alongside other formal innovations to recover the lives of early twentieth-century Black performers whose achievements were erased from mainstream American cultural history; The formal act of erasure is itself politically meaningful in African American contexts because it mirrors the historical experience of cultural suppression, and a poem that makes this parallel explicit can use form to make an argument about the relationship between official language and racial power; A poet might apply erasure to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, removing the language of universal rights that was never applied to enslaved people to reveal the gap between the document's promises and its historical reality; Ronald Johnson's foundational erasure of Milton's "Paradise Lost" has inspired African American poets to apply similar techniques to canonical Western texts, using erasure to critique the racial politics embedded in the European literary tradition that Black writers were simultaneously trained in and excluded from