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Millennials are often described as a generation addicted to smartphones, destined to remain dependent on screens for information because we never had to memorize anything. Our coupled with makes recall of information from our elementary, middle, and high school years elusive. But that might not be such a bad thing.

Too often, the history taught in our early school days was presented through a white, heteropatriarchal lens. Our textbooks did not include accurate depictions of the formative elements of America, and more recently, textbook publishers have come under fire for attempting to . There are five major distributors of educational materials for young people in the U.S.— Cengage Learning, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Scholastic— and chances are, you probably did not see a book from outside this list in your entire K-12 experience. Regrettably, most of these textbooks entirely misrepresent minority experiences, where slaves were “,” the first Thanksgiving was between Native Americans and European settlers, and Asian-Americans are often .

The inherent racism of American history textbooks is and has a long history of mis-educating students about the soil on which the country stands. And each year, a push to re-educate ourselves comes along on the third Monday in January, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Perhaps no one individual has been more profoundly misrepresented than Dr. King, who, according to Fox News, is having his memory , which should be about “national unity, not political division.” Dr. King has been converted into a political figure that , completely devoid of his criticism of that same group— particularly white moderates— who refuse to truly educate themselves on the depth of racial inequality in this country. Dr. King was than our history textbooks led us to believe, and we owe him, and all the other misrepresented members of American history, our full and complete attention so as to understand their true legacies. Dr. King is just one example, and there are hundreds more people, events, and movements that we can not fully understand from the textbooks that were given to us.

So here’s my pitch: millennials, and especially white millennials, need to make a real and true effort to re-visit our country’s history— and truthfully this time. We all have a lot to learn. But we also have a great deal of information at our disposal— through podcasts, libraries, and blogs— to access a more accurate history. To jumpstart this process, here’s a reading list to pursue.

1. Knowing whose land we work, live, and travel on, with the help of . It is an interactive map of the U.S., Canada, and Australia that tells you the tribes that have claims to this land, as well as links to tribal websites where you can learn more about the history, culture, and current initiatives of the people.

2. Understanding the invisibility of racism in American textbooks through (especially chapter five), a comprehensive re-write of what you would normally find in history textbooks.

3. Learning the history of white feminism and white suffragette’s exclusion of black women from their movement through some great . Their series, OG History, also covers a lot of amazing stories and is mainly written by female journalists of color.

4. Challenging the model minority myth through reading about the of America.

5. Fully grasping the implications of our housing decisions as we move from city to city. Here in D.C., there is a helpful project that is in the city. Initiatives like these exist in a lot of other places as well.

These are just the start of what should be a lifelong dedication to re-educating ourselves, and others around us, about the true history of all Americans. We can not really understand modern policy, discourse, and systemic inequalities if we do not have a firm grasp on history— and that history needs to be fully representative and, above all, accurate.