The problem is that using the criteria of "well within the lifetime of people alive" is arbitrary. Nazis killed six million Jews -- an evil much worse than slavery -- well within the lifetime of people alive. All sorts of people having been doing all sorts of mean things to other people well within the lifetime of people alive.

I'm in my 40s, which means that I never knew a society that wouldn't allow blacks to vote. I certainly had nothing to do with slavery. I used to find this identity politics justified, then amusing (as I thought through it some more), and now it's just feeble.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those that start each day looking for opportunities and those that start each day looking to the past. I'd rather be the second kind of person. So I don't discriminate based on color, won't put up with others who do, and am finished with considering race an interesting or important issue.

As an aside, there's a serious issue with segregating population based on skin color (as opposed to any other random collection of genes)for purposes of commentary -- it actually reinforces the idea that somehow people of one color are different than another. Of course we all know that patterns appear in the genetic pool, but using skin color as a predominant discriminating factor is, as best, misguided. At worst, it can cause the exact types of behavior we all agree is so bad.