'Merica, Land Of the... Free?

Recently in Humanities, we have been working more towards slavery and current racism occurring in America.  We watched the movie "Crash" as well as have been reading A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.  This book opened us up to Native American abolition as well as the current state of America's racism.  Both of these have really been eye opening for different reasons.  The movie "Crash" was much more relatable and more accessible compared with the time frame of the movie compared with Zinn's writings.  Howard Zinn's book was much more straightforward in the sense of telling us what happened all those years ago in terms of slavery, racism and colonization instead of having us extract that ourselves.
Living in a town with only 16,000 people I am very sheltered when it comes to severe racism as well as just exposure to things related to racism that you may see in a large city.  Because of not being that exposed or accustomed to racism in America, I have made the mistake of making the assumption that racism is not that big of an issue at all, since in Durango I feel that the racism is not as large of a problem as it is in some other places.
I am thankful to live in a small town, but when the time comes to move on, maybe to a larger city I feel that racism can be a much larger issue than expected.  Of course, not everyone is racist in the sense of discrimination and hatred, but I do also feel that it is a natural human response to see things as well as people and make comparisons and note internally those differences we may see between ourselves and that other individual.  These realizations don't have to be negative, just a way of making comparisons.  Because of this, I believe that ridding the world of all racism is nearly impossible.  People have been so taught and conditioned over the past 6 centuries to our dirty past as well as what American history used to include, and whether people like it or not, these things that occurred so long in the past between our ancestors cannot just be forgiven and forgotten, but they have to be remembered and not overlooked in order to move along and make progress.  Over the recent years I think that America has made progress in the hope to rid ourselves of racism, but as new problems and hatred arise, naturally, so do new tensions and problems between people.  It's a never-ending cycle that I believe is not natural, but since our ancestor's dirty laundry has been passed down for so long I believe that it will be nearly impossible to start over with a clean slate.

Picture from the movie "Crash"