You are missing the point. White folks cannot speak with the same intimacy to a life lived by another group.Addressing such issues will always come with a degree of insurmountable blindness. Instead, if one needs to speak of healing disputes they would be better served to address basic human needs. It is the point of convergence for all examinations that seek to address human problems.
You are diverging to nonsense. You need to read a bit on how nations like ours with problems like ours solved their problems. The world is full of successes and glaring failures as well. None of these nations ever began with saying one side need to apologize. That is the point.
Agree, apology or not we have to move on as a nation.
However my beef with Carib J, you or anyone else is the notion that one has to belong to the race to know the race and speak on behalf of that race.Over the years all across the world we have witneesed folks who do not belong to a certain race or group but stood up side by side to assist them to fight thier battles.
CaribJ assumption that ramblings by an ethnic group is only for that groups eras is nonsense.
One cannot speak intimately about things they have not experienced. One can only abstract if one is able to parallel with similar experiences. Whitefolk cannot speak truly of the slave or colonial experience with any intimate knowledge. It is always a different story line from those that lived it.
It is a problem addressed as the absence of "worldliness" by the brilliant Islamic scholar Edward Said in his seminal book "Orientalism". It is not a matter of being comrades in arms in a struggle. It is not presuming to define for other what they ought to do in order to reconcile a picture of your sense of grief.
To reconnect as humans you have to address human needs from a basic needs viewpoint. All humans have the same needs for love, family, Sense of belonging, security etc even if these come with contextual differences. That alone is our common thread and where we must always begin