After the 2016 election, we started taking our political selves more seriously, and started making sure that we’re always shrinking our blind spots. One aspect of this is the slavery-ended-in-1865-so-racism-is-gone-now myth, which because of the kinds of lives we’ve led hasn’t really been challenged.

This is part of our 100 Things in 2017 challenge. Click on the photos for a closer look!

We wanted to learn more about this, but it’s hard. You can’t truly know what it’s like to be a black person in America without actually being a black person in America, and it isn’t really fair to ask a black person to teach us – it’s not someone else’s job to fix my ignorance.

So we were glad to discover A Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves, which is a list of books, essays, newspaper articles, and bits of history that black people have recommended for people like us who want to educate ourselves. It’s quite an eye-opener.

We both read through all of the live links, and Becky (because she’s such a fast reader) made it through some of the book list as well. This stuff is hard to read, but we feel like knowing these perspectives is the literal least we can do to be good neighbors and allies.

Some of you reading this will write it off as a political post. It’s true, we’re generally liberal people, but regardless of your political persuasion, it really is worthwhile to read about the experience of your fellow citizens. We highly recommend this list to anybody, even if you just read one or two articles.