Kitchen photo:
This was "white privilege" in Britain in 1962.
A gravedigger, his wife, and five children shared one bedroom, one kitchen, one living room, and a communal toilet.
Western prosperity was not inherited. It was built.

In Pennsylvania, boys as young as nine worked around coal for ten hours a day, six days a week.
They breathed coal dust all day.
In 1902, a boy could earn just 50 to 70 cents for ten hours of work.

In 1842, the British government sent inspectors into Liverpool to count the dead. 62% of the working-class people who died that year were children under five. Half of the shopkeepers' children died before the age of five as well.

Then there was America's famous "white privilege." By 1900, two-thirds of New York's population lived in tenements.
Jacob Riis counted twelve adults sleeping in a room thirteen feet across. Most were poor European immigrants.

The "white privilege" theory says you were born into an advantage you never earned.
It claims that your comfort came at someone else's expense and that the honest response is guilt.
Your great-grandfather probably didn't get an advantage. He got black lung at forty and a toilet he shared with four families.

Your ancestors didn't wake up one morning in a rich country.
They dug the coal, laid the railways, worked the mills, built the sewers, fought the wars, and raised families in rooms we'd now call uninhabitable.

Slavery and colonialism were real, and Western countries profited from both. Nobody serious denies that. But they don't explain why the West became prosperous.
Slavery and conquest existed across the world for centuries.
If they were enough to create prosperity, every civilization that practiced them would have become rich.

You didn't inherit privilege.
You inherited something your ancestors already paid for.
Don't apologize for what they built. Owe them gratitude.

(BasicOptimism)