Again on collective apologies

Round at Harry's Place, Brett says he doesn't see the point of 'symbolic gestures in which people who aren't guilty of perpetrating an injustice apologise to people who weren't victims of it'. Well, it's his right not to be in favour of such apologies, but he's wrong to say about the apology for slavery in particular that it's a 'racist gesture' - presupposing, as he argues it does, that the continuities of responsibility and victimhood are based on 'a sharing [of] racial and cultural characteristics with the original people involved'. To see why this is wrong, one has only to suppose that the enslaving and enslaved populations had belonged to the same (putative) racial or cultural group but, let us say, lived in adjacent countries. An apology would still be possible, delivered by today's political representatives of Enslavonia to the people of New Freedonia. One may think there's no point in the apology, or that though there can be some point in it, this is outweighed by other considerations (such as a worry about the sincerity of it, or about its being issued for vulgar political advantage etc). But there's no defensible intellectual basis for the claim that institutional collectivities can't coherently apologise for past wrongs when those issuing the apology bear no blame for the wrongs in question. Nothing mystical about supra-individual personality, nothing obnoxious about racial responsibility, need be assumed in such cases. Otherwise you'd have to deny that a university can coherently apologize for a wrong done to one of its students once those responsible for the wrong have moved on. But it can - as (mutatis mutandis) can firms, civil service departments, the BBC, ballet companies, rugby clubs and nations. (See this post and its links.)