"Post-Racial" State?

Someone recently asked, "...are we really in a 'post-racial' state?" If we take for granted that humanity can be divided into something called "races" (an assertion to which I do not ascribe), then an understanding of human nature, and an honest view of human history and current culture leads one to the conclusion that it is either the height of ignorance or the depths of disingenuousness to assert that we are in a "post-racial state". Racism is simply the human trait of self-aggrandizement generalized to an entire population of people. It will always exist. Even when we have mixed our genes to the point that all physical differences are essentially gone, we will still find some way to distinguish ourselves from each other--whether it is based on the length of our noses, the size of our feet, or the thickness of our eyebrows.
In one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek (the Original Series), the Enterprise encounter the last two survivors of a dead planet. The two races of that planet had destroyed themselves in a global civil war, and the two survivors were the last representatives of their respective races. To the members of the Enterprise crew, they appeared to be practically identical--humanoid, with a very unique skin pigmentation. Their bodies were of two colors, split right down the middle, with one half pitch black and the other half pure white. The one difference between them was that one was black on the RIGHT side and the other black on the LEFT side. Yet this seemingly trivial difference was enough to engender the deepest racial hatred between them--a hatred that led them to seek to destroy each other, even knowing that the war in which they were involved, and that had already destroyed their entire world, was over!
Still, the fact that racism exists, and always will, is no reason to throw up our hands and accept it and its negative repercussions. The best way to combat it is not to deny that it exists, but to confront it, one person at a time, and render it powerless by showing each person whom we meet or engage that we are just like they are--with similar hopes, fears, dreams, ambitions, and shortcomings. And once they begin to see in us what they see in themselves, we become part of their "race" and no longer something or someone foreign to them.