Courtney Ford Instagram – American history has been sanitized. Any truths deemed too unpleasant or shameful have been minimized or erased. You may know this, but think it has nothing to do with today. Please ask: Whom does a sanitized history benefit, and to what end? How has our collective miseducation informed our behavior, and our beliefs about ourselves and others? If your knee-jerk reaction is to say, “The past is the past, GET OVER IT!”, why? What is underneath that tight feeling of defensiveness? Pain cannot be healed until it is acknowledged. A cycle cannot be broken until we understand what perpetuates it. Why is the picture in my previous post of a mob harassing Edith and Arthur Lee not in our American History books? Why did so many people, myself included, first learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre after seeing it depicted on the Watchmen on HBO Max? We are so deeply enmeshed within a system, that we cannot see that a system exists. We are the fish who don’t comprehend the existence of water. Listen now: We can forgive ourselves for accepting this sanitized history as children. But we as adults have no excuse. The smart phone you’re reading this on contains 100,000x more processing power than the computer that helped put a man on the moon. Re-educate yourself. There is no excuse. Edit: “where do I start??” How To Be An Antiracist by @ibramxk White Fragility by Robin Diangelo