MY ANCESTORS ....

Human beings perfected the art of exploiting various special statuses they hold in society. Retired people will be heard bitching how "this generation has no manners" and how no one takes care of their needs these days, despite them giving their best years to provide for current generations, homosexuals will always feel persecuted, and would probably invent homophobia, if it didn't exist. Religious people are the champions of this art, one might even say they came up with it. A sure way to see an adult turn into a petulant child is by defaming their religious iconography. 

All of these pale in comparison to another expertise of social status exploitation that people masterfully incorporate into their every day life;  exploiting perceived historic injustices that got bestowed upon "their people" in the past. Black people will rave about their ancestors being slaves.  I call that the Spike Lee modus operandi. They will stipulate that these horrible things which were done to them in the past are for certain a reason enough for being especially socially sensitive towards their heirs in the present. Native Americans will tell you all about their people being murdered by colonizers through various ingenious methods accompanying the run-of-the-mil slaughter, such as chickenpox infested blankets. It goes without saying that even their present day offspring deserves to be pitied and compensated over their ancestors losing ancient lands of their people. Koreans will never forgive the Japanese for 2nd World-war atrocities  as Korean girls were forced to prostitute themselves to the Japanese soldiers. As such decdentants of these exploited sex workers should obviously get some kind of compensation for unimaginable suffering of their grandmothers. Modern day Jewish people will more than likely mention Holocaust at some point while you're having coffee with them. This plight affected their community so deeply that surely, even people who were born three generations after the Holocaust are still reeling from the consequences. 

Don't get me wrong, I would never deny terrible things that were done in the past. People are just evolutionary driven animals, who steal, cheat, connive and murder for their own self interest and interest of their local family, tribe, ethnic group or national state. There is no honour among apex predators. We have since improved as a species in general, mostly thanks to the humanism and renaissance movements in Europe as well as civil liberties that first got postulated during the French Revolution, liberties which today seem self evident, but before the great insights of such thinkers as Kant and Rousseau almost sounded contradicting and illogical. These advances will never erase all the horrors of the past, but maybe they will serve as reminders, so such things might never happen again. "Never Again" reads a monument standing where unspeakable horrors of Dachau once happened. 

However, what does all this have to do with modern descendents of people that got wronged in the past? Do they deserve to be treated with beyond-the-reasonable-norm respect and special social considerations just because they belong to a particular ethnic, political or religious group that at one point in history got wronged? I don't believe so. I fail to see a causal connection between an individual living in 2013 and his ancestor that got wronged on account on his race. If anything I see this as modern day people exploiting the plight of their forefathers. What do contemporary black people have to do with ancient slave trade? What do distinguished socialites in TelAviv have to do with people who died painfully of typhoid related causes in Auschwitz? Just about as much as I have to do with ancient long-forgotten indigenous tribes of the Balkans whose genes I probably carry, which probably got massacred by Slavic settlers long centuries ago. Pretty much nothing I would be justified to bitch about in the 21st century.

Every human being deserves to be treated with dignity. But don't ask for unwarranted respect for something you had nothing to do with. It does not concern you personally. You can be proud of your heritage, but don't go pleading for special considerations because of it. You want respect, go out and earn it. You are the only one that can make a purpose in your life. Not your ethnicity nor your culture or religion. Only you.