If you remain attracted to group guilt as being valid, some thought games. Does someone white who migrates to america thereby adopt guilt for wrongs? Does that person become liable due to the move? What about someone black who migrates? What about their child? Should the child be guilty or half guilty? Should the tax system be adjusted to compensate? How about for gender issues? Does a man inherit responsibility for past wrongs done to women?
If you accept group guilt or intergenerational guilt you are constructing a cast society, where people are defined by their lineage and physical characteristics, rather their actions as an individual. This entrenches social divisions and undermines individual agency and freedom. Western culture, nations and law are grounded in individual responsibility not group identity and are the better for it.
Read my comment again, I never mentioned guilt.
Consider the opposing argument - groups have no responsibility for anything.
Does that seem like a reasonable position?
Consider an expansion of the argument - are there still situations in which one group consistently discriminates against and abuses another?
People are already in castes, defined by their lineage and physical (and economic) characteristics.
You don't break down the walls between castes by pretending they're not real.
Only those that have proxies to accountable individuals, as in the example of the corporation, and with its exceptions such as with limited liability. Or an association, which has a board and a charter.
> Consider the opposing argument - groups have no responsibility for anything. Does that seem like a reasonable position?
Apart from formal corporations/associations, that is the reasonable position. In the context of the case, "Asian Americans" have no moral or legal responsibility to give up opportunities to "African Americans".
Westerners are not in castes.
One quibble with the word 'group' there, too: Ethnic groups are reference categories, not groups in the sense it'd make sense to think of groups as eg. decisionmaking entities that can be responsible for something.
That of course, is a racist idea, because it assigns group responsibility to the murders committed by individuals.
Let what go ?
If someone was wronged by a corporation should they let it go ?
Even forgetting slavery, black people were wronged for generations by the state, municipalities, armed forces, banks, schools, restaurants, law enforcement, sports teams - and these were not random one off situations but discrimination by a system of racists.
A whole race collectively screwed over.
They wouldn’t let people into restaurants based on skin color alone - no one considered the individual