I don’t know how you “got here,” but speaking for myself, I immigrated here at the age of four, and my forefathers had nothing to do with slavery, Jim Crow, racism or anything else of that sort; in fact, around the same time American blacks were slaves, my ancestors would’ve been serfs (similar to slaves) tied to the land in Russia. So, I feel no personal guilt for or responsibility for slavery, discrimination or any of that other stuff. This is the danger of making over-generalizations about “white” people in what is a nation of immigrants.

But even if you happen to be one of those whose ancestors benefited from slavery or white supremacy, so what? Are we supposed to punish children for the sins of their fathers? Are we supposed to remedy one historical injustice by committing another historical injustice in the opposite direction? I make a more involved argument about how U.S. history is being manipulated today to guilt-trip, bully and silence those people who are perceived to be powerful in America here, https:[email protected][email protected]-98eeea6b6151#.6a6ti3lkv, and I won’t recapitulate that whole argument in this response, but suffice it to say that I think the only way out of this whole mess we as a nation got ourselves into is to get beyond the kind of polarizing, divisive racial thinking that results in making all kinds of false and demeaning generalizations about who’s superior, who’s inferior, etc. Unfortunately, we, as a nation, are now going in the exact opposite direction: we’re talking more and more about race, which is just making people on all sides of this issue angrier and angrier.