1/ A short thread on dealing with our place in history: I've been invited to be part of a local discussion about race, starting within my own White community. In the 1980s I witnessed a similar process of how some Germans began to confront their history differently.

2/ I lived in Bielefeld (yes, *that* Bielefeld ), where the local town council sponsored a study of where every single Jewish resident had lived and worked, and what happened to them after 1933. Local students got involved.

3/ They researched what businesses were "aryanized" (i.e., stolen from their Jewish owners) and they traced what happened to all these residents: who was killed in the camps, and who survived. They reached out to survivors around the world and interviewed them.

4/ The project concluded with a major exhibition in city hall. Such initiatives happened in towns across Germany, and some Holocaust scholars believe that such localized initiatives helped lay the foundation for a different kind of consensus about the need to address the past.

5/ There are lots of lists out there of very good books, videos, blogs etc. on what we White people should read. But there's special power and meaning in looking at the history of where *we* actually live, actually worship, actually work, and where our families stood in this.

6/ There's a special power in making visible the full-peopled history of the familiar places around us--a history that our privileged place has kept invisible to us. Only then do we see who we really are; only then do we have a real foundation for personal and political change.