Racism

Nothing gets my blood boiling faster then prescribing guilt to me for crimes that past generations committed, that I was in no way part of.
I come to this thought because of a discussion in my English class today. We were discussing the book Native Guard (which has some very nice poems in it, by the way, I'm not putting down the book at all), and some themes that my classmates came up with were specifically racism and memory... And perhaps (I hope) I interpreted my classmates incorrectly, but the memory of which they spoke was the attempt to keep memory fresh, to treat the past as if it was alive today, as if white people should still be paying penance for past sins.
I am white, and I am not racist.
I have had no part in any racist activities, today or in an age where I hadn't even been born yet. I believe that prescribing the sins of a past generation to an individual is racism, a deceptively subtle racism that undermines attempts to encourage the world to see past color and just look at the individual.
Individual. That's such a beautiful word. That I can be myself, that I can choose who I am and what I do with my life, that I don't have to be what others assume.
That I can forgive and move on.
Don't let the history books forget, because a forgotten history repeats itself. But let the pain be forgotten. Let the anger, and the hate, and the mistrust be forgotten. As long as any group of people keeps holding onto these feelings like they are life themselves, as long as we as a people act like there are sides in the first place, things might get better to a degree, but there will always be those lines drawn. There will always be a divide.
And I don't want to sound like racism doesn't exist today, or that just ignoring it will make it magically disappear. It's a hard, consistent effort to scrub away something that ugly. But, to use a metaphor, when you scrub a stain out of something, putting forth hours of painful effort, all of your work is wasted, all of the pleasure you could be taking in looking at the newly cleaned and beautified space is poisoned, if all that you think about is the stain that used to be there.
It's time to stop thinking about old stains, and start cleaning up existing ones, to make sure that this house we share is clean and beautiful.