Americans have a peculiar sense of time.
Many other countries can trace their history for millennia, if not as nations, then as cultures and societies: China, England, Egypt, Japan, Ethiopia. The United States has really only existed for a blip in time (having actively divorced itself from the society that occupied the land before it).
Perhaps because our country is relatively young, the scale on which we measure our history has been shortened. The majority of our historic sites are at most 300 years old, and we think a 50-year-old building is ancient.
This mindset makes it easy to believe that our past is far behind us. But in reality, every aspect of our history has occurred within just a few generations.
Eliza Moore, the last known legal enslaved person, died in 1948. That means your parents (or certainly grandparents) had the opportunity to hear first-hand accounts from those who experienced American slavery. The
13th Amendment was passed less than 150 years ago,
less than twice our current lifespan.
Anyone currently over the age of 50 lived in a time when police dogs and firehoses were
unleashed on school children* and people of different races couldn't even be in
swimming pools together. It is within a single generation of us that people of color were regularly
denied the right to vote.** For centuries, officials were elected, laws were written, and a racialized society was legally maintained. And we think that all that has been washed away after just a few short decades?
How can we claim we are colorblind when this is the environment in which we have come of age? State-sanctioned, legally-mandated racism was in place less than a generation ago. How can we think we are free from the prejudice that was so recently the law of the land?
The idea that we are 'post-racial' is laughable. To assert that we should 'move on' or 'just get over it' is ludicrous given the accumulated injustice and disparity that has birthed our modern racialized society. The consequences of a not-so-distant past reverberate loudly today in our
segregated cities, our
education systems, in
police behavior, and in the
justice system.
Imagine if Germany had a society in which Jewish citizens were imprisoned
twice as frequently and then
disproportionately executed. The world would be up in arms! Yet with the USA's own brutal track record with people of color, our current practices remain unchecked.
If we are allowed to distance ourselves from a recent past, we may come to believe that we are inherently better people than those that came before. We forget that they read the bible, attended church, loved their children, and gave to charity, just like we do. Hiding behind the idea of 'ancient history' allows us to live unexamined lives in the present.
*Update: That sentence was written before
Michael Brown was shot. Turns out this history is even more recent that initially stated. In fact, it's not even history.
**Similarly, see
The Trouble with Voter ID Laws
Modern racism is systemic. It's endemic to our education system, our legal structure, and everyday life. Decades of oppression have established an unbalanced system that is no accident. Ignorant complacency simply allows one to benefit from that racialized system without having to own up to the responsibility of its existence. It is no accident that white folk are unaware of painful truths of continuing racism. We don't want to be. 
Americans have a peculiar sense of time.
This mindset makes it easy to believe that our past is far behind us. But in reality, every aspect of our history has occurred within just a few generations. Eliza Moore, the last known legal enslaved person, died in 1948. That means your parents (or certainly grandparents) had the opportunity to hear first-hand accounts from those who experienced American slavery. The 13th Amendment was passed less than 150 years ago, less than twice our current lifespan.
