> Nor did he see the irony in the fact that holding a person responsible for horrible action of people who look like them is the same way of thinking that leads bigots to blame all Arabs for the actions of the 9/11 hijackers.
I like to do the "Muslim test" on these things: replace "white people" (or "men", or any other group) with "Muslims" and see how it sounds then. If it sounds yikes then it's probably not a good thing to say.
I use "Muslim" because there's been a lot of discussion surrounding that in my own country, but you can use "Jew", "black", etc. as well.
It's easy to forget how sweeping statements can be received by its targets. I think we've all been guilty of this sometimes. The only time I've ever had a HN comment moderated is when I made some overly general statements about British culture. Mea culpa.
It's only natural to make mistakes, and that's okay. The difference is that I've apologized for it and realized my mistake, rather than double down hard (in my defence, as an EU expat living in the UK at the time, I was rather ... peeved ... about Brexit at the time, the surrounding debate regarding EU migrants, and various people ranting to me about this, as were most of my EU expat friends).
I vote things like the Green party and Socialist party, and the only time I've been directly involved in political activism was to campaign in favour of an asylum centre in my home town after idiots started opposing it with all sorts of bullshit. It's perhaps a bit said that this needs to be said, but I'm hardly some alt-right troll. But I find the messaging on these kind of things increasingly tiresome and frankly toxic.