Should We Apologize? - Editorial

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Can we hold others accountable for their groups actions?

At this point in humanities history, it’s pretty hard to deny that we haven’t done bad things as a species. Starting during the days of cavemen, we’ve killed for food, raped for pleasure, fought in pointless wars, enslaved for labor, and persecuted people based on their race, sex, and religion. Not the best track record, but we’re not here to talk about what we’ve done, but rather talk about what people are doing about it. In our modern age where persecution is treated very harshly, many of the minority groups of the world: the blacks, the gays, the Jews, and others, all wanting revenge on their subjugators. Starting in the early 2000’s with the rise of the internet and social media, many radical people have been sparking full on revolutions against one particular demographic of people: those decedent of Europe, formally known as the Caucasian race: white people.

G’ Day mates! Cameron Levengood, generic white Christian man here, and I’m looking to take a closer look at our growing problems with class in the modern world. When I mean class, I am of course referring to classism, that is, the prejudice expressed towards someone based on their social class, which applies to more than just your income. For example, not promoting a Muslim to an executive position in a company based upon his religion would be an act of classism, because his religions beliefs are irrelevant to making money. In the modern day, it can apply to virtually any label that you can be given to anyone, whether that be age, wealth, occupation, religion, ideology, sexual orientation, or any other factor that should be used as a way to judge how someone conducts themselves in the real world. Today, it’s man against man, upper class vs lower class, man vs woman, blue collar vs white collar, young vs old, theist vs atheist, democrat vs republican, gay vs straight, black vs white and class against class. Prejudice exists in all forms, and happens to all people of all types. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be focusing on racism, classism, and sexism, the three main forms of prejudice.  

The goal of this article is going to be answering the title question: should we apologize? That is, should the majority of white men alive today have to pay reparations for work done by their ancestors? We’re going to be looking at some of the history of white attackers, modern movements against them, and some of the double standards being imposed before we answer.

So, why do people blame the whites? Now that we’ve addressed what classism is (as well as prejudice in general), we’d better dive into why the white race is a direct target of the conflicts we’ve seen popping up all over social media and other places. From a historical perspective, it makes since why we’ve often blamed them for many of these conflicts. The Italians waged war on the barbarian tribes of Germania and Espania during the times of Rome for being perceived as a lower form of intelligence. Spain, once the target of discrimination, then captured, enslaved, and converted Native Americans on the basis of not just their race, but their non-Christian religion, and liberal sexual values. And the Third Reich persecuted all kinds of people during the holocaust, whether it be Jews, the mentally retarded, the physically disabled, or anyone else that didn’t fit into their cookie cutter mold of what perfection was. Upon further inspection though, it becomes clear that this form of judgment being placed on a whole group (or class) of people clearly has its roots in the very same prejudice that sparked the “anti-white person” movement in the first place.

However, that’s not good enough for some people. Even if there are some double standards at play, perhaps it’s well deserved for how cruel “all” white people have been. Some recent movements in the space can perhaps shed some light into the darkness, helping us to understand more about how and what motivates these people. We’ll be looking at the BlackLivesMatter, and Feminist movements of modern day, which by some accounts, aren’t concerned with equality among the races and genders, as much as they are concerned with giving themselves a stronger position in society to make up for the slack they’ve been given by the majority as the minority.  These, of course, aren’t the only two groups like this around, but I will be using them for this article.

So, should white people be in debt to others for the actions of their ancestors? These groups think so, with a majority of their members open to the idea of, to put it kindly; make white men powerless in society. Do all people act like this? No, but there are certainly a few.

The BlackLivesMatter movement started online as a direct response to police brutality in the black community: something good. This is an issue that needs to have attention brought onto it. However, more often than not, it doesn’t stop there. Members of this group usually take it one step further by getting aggressive towards white people, sometimes to the point of threatening and attacking them, while supporting those who do. Recently with the Chicago Facebook Kidnapping, it’s becoming more and more common for radical members of this and similar organizations to make direct attacks against white people based solely on their color: something bad.

On the topic of gender, the Feminist movement, starting off as the woman’s suffrage movement, was a play at getting women the same treatment as men. They would go onto secure equal voting rights around most of the world, as well as rights for property ownership and equal representation in the government: that’s good. Half of the population should be given the same opportunities as the other half, and someone’s delicates shouldn’t be a factor that dictates your skills in various fields. However, some of these women take it too far, demanding ridiculous double standards for men to uphold while woman do not. Once considered acts of chivalry, boxes of chocolates, roses, and taking long walks on the beach were considered acts of kindness that were the direct product of true love. Now, many hardcore feminist will demand this kind of treatment 24/7 without anything in return, if they don’t consider it to be sexist at first: that’s bad.

Even then, it would be equally racist and sexist of me to say white men are the victim here. Have you ever heard of Donald Trump? He’s essentially become the antithesis of members of the white community who believe they’ve been given the short end of the stick recently. In a world where coming out as gay is celebrated and being a powerful black is better than being a powerful white, many people around the world are preaching exactly that. When does it all end? If you’ve been watching the news recently, you probably know about the Muslim ban, and Trump’s announcement that women should “dress like women”, all of which are last ditch efforts to keep white men in a position of power, and just adds more fuel for the fires of not only the two organizations I described above, but most of the world in general.

However, that’s not to say that these groups are inherently bad, or evil. Long time readers should know by this point that I’m not a huge fan of absoultionism, that is, the belief in absolutes. Saying that every member of these communities are somehow bad, and want nothing more than to manipulate the public into giving them more power is just plain wrong. There are no doubt good people in these organizations who want nothing more than to see equality just like people do on the other side. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that there’s good and bad people on both sides of everything, and there’s always a healthy percentage that falls right in the middle.

Humanity has created a vicious cycle, like humanity usually does, of pointing fingers and name calling. Group A treats group B bad for treating them bad, and group B treats group A bad for treating them bad, then add in group C & D, and well, you can see where I am going. At this point it’s become hard to even find where the torment began, and if it’s even going on today for the right reasons. It’s pretty much been established that every group around today has been both the victim and the victimizer at some point, so it is sometimes hard to says who’s right and who’s wrong. We’ve all done things we regret, then add in all the bad things are ancestors have done, it would be hard for anyone to come out on top. So, isn’t there some way we can just forgive each other, and try to move on from the past, while trying to look towards the future?

To avoid procrastinating the target question, let’s summarize what we’ve discussed so far. There are, needless to say, a lot of people alive today who think that the former is all true: if racism and sexism is going to stop, we need to eliminate the problem at its original source. Since killing people is illegal, however, many see that payback is still due. Sure, there’s no secret that, in broad- terms, white men are indeed the source of racism and sexism in the modern day, but what then?

So, to answer the title question: should we apologize? Nope. It’d be prejudice too. Even though this article was racially and sexually focused, and because of that it got kind of hard to follow, its nonetheless wrong to demand something in return from someone for the actions of another person, whether it’s because of their race, gender, religion, or so on and so forth.

Thanks for reading everyone. This was kind of a long article for such a short and easy to answer question, but to I still think that it was nonetheless answered. If you liked it, were informed by if, or want to give me some tips on how I can improve it, remember that you can always comment down below, or over on social media (links at the bottom). Thanks for reading, and don’t touch that dial!

Please note: no prejudices of any kind were implied by this article.

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