I agree that apologies can be overdone. However, in diplomacy, domestic politics and interpersonal relationships an apology is frequently the first step in addressing an illegal, unjust or otherwise harmful act that has yet to be resolved. The apology is an acknowledgement by the aggressor that he, she or it has wronged the victim and thus it has both legal and moral value.
No, you as an individual (regardless of heritage) do not owe anyone an apology for wrongs that you did not personally commit. But corporations and governments are 'legal persons' and as long as they continue to function they remain, so to speak, 'alive.' And as such, they may still bear liability for misdeeds that were carried out decades, or even centuries earlier.
One other point, and I only mention this because you indicated that you aspire to be a historian. As I understand your thesis, you are saying that we are all frail, fallible humans and on occasion, to be blunt at the expense of being crude, we all fuck up. So don't obsess about the past--let's just look forward ... and try to get it right this time. If that isn't more or less what you are saying, please correct me.
At one level, that sounds good. But it will never, ever transpire that way because doing what you ask runs contrary to human nature. A psychologist (or maybe a psychiatrist, I don't call) once did a very revealing experiment. He filled two rooms with a mix of people (different ages, genders, etc.). He then gave each person several sheets of paper and a pen. He instructed people in one room to write about the thing that made them the happiest in life; in the other room, participants were asked to write about the thing that always aroused the most anger in them. Within a short time, the chroniclers of happiness had finished and left--but those in the anger room just kept on writing ... for a far longer period of time.
And that is when the researcher realized something: at a visceral level people like being angry. As a historian, I think you will discover something similar to that: communities that have been subjected to what they perceive as a grave injustice never forget it. Think of the Jews, scattered and exiled for 2,000 years, but never giving up on recovering their homeland. Or the resentent between the Armenians and the Turks., or the Koreans and Japan. There is still a lot of tension between the Irish and the English. And then you have the Walloons and the Flemish, the Tutsi and the Hutu
as well as India and Pakistan ... and on and on and on.
It is always best to move toward reconciliation, and some type of just settlement as soon as possible when a conflict comes to an end--before the perceived act of in justice becomes an integral part of a community's mythos. After the First World War, the victorious Allies took a punitive approach to the defeated Central Powers ... and planted the seeds for the 2nd World War. Fortunately, we learned something from that experiernce and helped rebuild Europe with the Mashall Plan after the second war--with a much better outcome.
