wouldn't make a difference other than to make them respect he GOP a little more. The biggest obstacle I see to any kind of en masse apology (other than a lack of flying pigs) is that Republicans resent the way we are still blamed for not supporting civil rights for black. I can't tell you how many times I have been called a racist because I oppose affirmative action or because I think welfare reform was the best thing Clinton did. So many Republicans are never going to feel safe apologizing. I think the best we can hope for is a slow and quiet acceptance, which I believe is happening now. I'd say the problem with the last paragraph is that we still haven't had any kind of reckoning with the way race is used politically by... let's say "certain groups". Notably, it wasn't REPUBLICANS who opposed civil rights for blacks; it was white southerners, who were generally more likely to be found in the Democratic Party at the time (and certainly it was the Democratic Party of its day that opposed emancipation). The problem is that you had an entire generation (or two? three?) of political operatives who used things like the "southern strategy" to drum up white racial resentment and propel the Republican Party to power. Even through the 80s and 90s, you had your welfare queens and Willie Hortons and such. These were explicitly racialized appeals to angry white voters who nursed lingering resentment about racial equality.