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The retractions are coming a minute apart

Some ignorant things I’ve said in the past have been weighing heavily on me, so I’d like to try to apologize for them. I don’t know how much it’ll help, but I feel like it’s better than nothing.

In 2005, I wrote a cynical take on a Black History Month talent show that they had everybody attend at school. It pretty much devolved into a rant about how I couldn’t identify with any specific racial or ethnic group. I don’t suppose I have much to apologize for here, but I feel like I should mention that I understand the situation more now.

The message of the show was that “black history is everyone’s history.” It would be more accurate to say that white history is everyone’s history. The reason we have things like Black History Month is because the standard historical narrative is dominated by white people—the majority. (As usual, The Onion got to this idea before me.)

There have been one or two times when I was one of the few white people in the room, and that gave me a small taste of what it might be like to be part of a racial or ethnic minority. It wasn’t fun, let me tell you. White people have the luxury of being the majority in many parts of the United States, and this white guy no longer feels like celebrations of white history are something he’s missing out on. If you think about it, they’re everywhere. On the other side of the coin, it’s also good to bond with people who aren’t like you, whence all this stuff about sharing your culture.

I do regret referring to the JROTC as the “Nazi Youth.” As much as I’m against warmongering and all that stuff, the fact remains that the Nazi Party didn’t invent marching in lockstep.

The following year, I was tapped to join a new club at school. It was ostensibly about being an upstanding citizen, but it had religious undertones, so I decided not to join. In the ensuing rant, I said:

Religion has given us the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust, to name but a few atrocities.

Why did I say that the Holocaust happened because of religion? You have to try to understand the position I was in at the time. Hear me out.

When I was growing up, it was my understanding that people were Jewish in the same way that we were Catholic and our neighbors were Lutheran or what have you. Judaism was just a religion to me, and why should be anything else if my Jewish playmates looked just like me? Of course, I saw the Passover episode of Rugrats, so I had this vague idea about the Jews being a people, but I didn’t fully comprehend it; in my experience, Jews were just people who practiced Judaism. And since I thought that that was the only difference between the Jews and the other people in Europe, that must be the reason for the Holocaust.

Embarrassing as it may be, my perspective didn’t start to change until I took a history class in college. I learned that in the United States, Jews were considered non-white until World War II, when a shift in cultural attitudes suddenly occurred. (If you want to reward the guy who taught me this, buy his iconoclastic new book, The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965, available now at fine bookstores everywhere!) And that’s pretty much how it occurred to me that the self-described Chosen People really are a people, even if they tend to look like some other peoples, who in turn all tend to look like each other.

So, in short: the Holocaust wasn’t caused by religion.

Last and least, I said New Yorkers were mean, and then I backpedaled but stopped short of apologizing. Well, now I apologize for saying that New Yorkers are mean. It’s unfair to characterize 8 million people like that.

A cartoon from The Oatmeal: 10 Reasons to Avoid Talking on the Phone. I’m reading The Oatmeal regularly now. It’s pretty hilarious. (Via J-Walk Blog)