Is corporate confession vicarious repentance?

We've seen a recent fad in which evangelical "leaders" think white Christians have a duty to exercise vicarious repentance for the sins of their racist forebears. This is defended on the grounds that Scripture contains corporate confessions (e.g. Dan 9, Ezra 9, Neh 9; 2 Chron 34). Is that analogous?

i) Let's begins with a comparison. Suppose you attend a church in which the pastor, elder, or lector recites a corporate confession. Is that vicarious repentance? No.

It uses the third-person plural, not because one person is confessing on behalf of and in place of another person, but because it's about more than one person. It's about each and everybody in attendance. When the speaker recites the corporate confession, he mentally includes himself. The confession is distributively collective. 

The corporate confession is about the living, not the dead. As the congregation listens, individuals are supposed to apply that to themselves. Agree in prayer with the words of the confession. Mentally assent to the words.

Although the pastor (elder, lector) is speaking on their behalf and in their stead, he's not repenting on their behalf and in their stead. It's no different in principle that a confession which the congregation recites in unison. It's just a different mode. Instead of everyone confessing the same prayer out loud, there's one speaker while everyone else listens along, in a contrite spirit, and silently assents to the confession.  

The corporate confessions in Scripture are like that.

ii) Apropos (i), it's meaningless to repent on behalf of and in place of, say, James Thornwell, Robert Lewis Dabney, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis et al. because they never shared the penitent attitude of the living supplicant. They didn't think they had anything to repent of in that regard. They thought their attitudes, and actions were justified. So vicarious repentance, in this context, involves the counterintuitive notion of repenting for another despite their impenitent attitude. That's diametrically opposed to my first example, where the principle of corporate confession is predicated on shared contrition. 

iii) When you read corporate confessions in Scripture, the reason they bring up the sins of their forbears is not to repent for what former generations did, but to acknowledge a chain of events leading up to the current situation. The living find themselves in this situation, not only for their own sins, but because the iniquity of former generations brought down divine judgment in the form of the Assyrian deportation, Babylonian Exile, and the like. It's not the living confessing for the dead, but the living remembering how God warned Israel that he would punish covenant-breakers. 

iv) Finally, it's about the horrified realization that some of the living are now repeating the sins of their wayward ancestors. They have yet to learn the lesson.