Your Guilt Is Neither Wanted Nor Helpful

If you think the push for social equality exists to make you feel bad, you need to take a step back.

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Gentiles love to tell me their ancestors were Nazis. Seriously. They’ll come up to me and say completely unprompted, “My great-grandpa was in Austria in 1937 and had no ties to any resistance movement, so...” Okay? I bet you felt awkward making your family tree in elementary school? What do you want me to say here?

Jewish people, of course, are far from the only ones who experience interactions like the one above. African-Americans have frequently made clear their discomfort with random white people who persist in seeking to “atone” for their white guilt, and it is not uncommon, for example, for trans people to have to sit through some emotionally-taxing tale of someone’s past transphobic sins in order to access an essential service.

I complain, but I have to be honest: sometimes these confessions are way better than the alternative, which is the complete denial that one’s family background has anything to do with the person they are today.

“I will NOT feel guilty for being born,” these folks say, presumably after a rousing Facebook debate in which nobody’s mind was changed. “I come from a nice, hardworking family. If somebody was a…