Afro-Turks’ ancestors were brought to the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) as slaves from various parts of Africa. Despite their longstanding presence, the descendants of these enslaved Africans—today, citizens of the Republic of Turkey—have until recently remained invisible both in the official historiography and in social research. This led to a collective amnesia that resulted in the invisibilization of the Afro-Turk community in the Turkish public imagination, and consequently was utilized in representing “race” as an external category: an imported problem from the West. Alongside race and racialization, discussions on slavery in the Ottoman Empire have also been consistently silenced, or represented as “benign.” The glorification of domestic work as a gateway into “becoming a part of the family,” for instance, obfuscated the truth around female labor and the exploitation of women. These (mis)representations continued to actively occupy an overwhelming space in mainstream discourses and operated in tandem with the erasure of enslaved female labor. Exploring the simultaneous existence and denial of slavery within the Ottoman Empire and of a racialized history in modern Turkey, this paper argues that this trivialization eventually had an impact on the invisibilization of domestic slavery from the studies of labor history and slavery in the region.