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@RamenCatholic ah the delights of federated social media. Lovely.

Responsibility (I don’t think “blame” is a useful concept, generally) for the actions of a country’s leaders is a complicated topic, but I don’t think we even need to get into that here. The original statement was that “not all americans” is equivalent to “not all men” or “not all white people”, phrases which are nominally good sentiments (as you note in the analogous countries example, there are some good men and good white people [too damn few, on both counts]) but in practice are almost exclusively used to absolve a member of the problematic group of any responsibility whatsoever because they don’t like the stuff the people in their group is doing.

That seems to be how “not all Americans” type sentiments are being used today, complete the same gross, evasive connotations as “not all men” etc. Like white supremacy impacts me too and I do what I can to fight it but that doesn’t mean I get to whip out “not all white people” to make myself feel better when a person of color is telling people off.