I don't have the words to accurately describe the importance of this book. All I can do is sit with the knowledge of how human beings can treat each other in the ugliest and most dehumanizing manners imaginable. It's not that I wasn't already aware of this part of ourselves, but I still have to sit in the discomfort of my history and my present.

Three particular points in this book that are sticking in my brain:

-"Question everything, especially if it makes you comfortable."  Seek out different perspectives. Confront your own biases. Don't accept a whitewashed version of history.

-"Forgive but never forget." Forgiveness does not mean never forgetting. If you forget, you cannot learn and you cannot teach, and then patterns are repeated. Reparations and civil rights cannot erase our history. We have to continue teaching the worst parts of our history in order to educate future generations, those whose ancestors were oppressed and those whose ancestors perpetuated the oppression.

-"I know because I lived it." There are Black people alive today who had relatives who were born enslaved or born just after emancipation, and who experienced Jim Crow. This means there are white people alive today who knew someone who was born before emancipation, who may have been born into a slave-owning family, and these white people perpetuated racism and terror towards Black people. This history is not old or distant. 

I have a lot of other thoughts that I can't put together. This should be taught in schools, but I have little faith that it ever will be.