So this conversation happened a few days ago

Now it seems a habit for many Redditors to want to ask the same question in one form or another: Why should I pay for the actions of people who came decades or even hundreds of years before me?

Now this is a ridiculous question on its face because paying for the actions of the past is a side effect of being alive. Everyone pays for the mistakes of those who came before them. But it often asked on this website with such a thick layer of white privilege, it is almost like talking to a wall.

As a black person, it is exceedingly obvious of the many ways white people have earned from the violent history of the U.S. (and most other settler colonies across the Americas). A history that labeled their ancestors desirable to migrate here when stringent laws prevented almost all immigration except from Europe. One that has at some times openly support eugenics, and denied basic citizenship rights, access to capital and a social welfare net to non-whites. One that has outright sought the destruction of other cultures not considered European enough while perfectly able to allow new white Americans to participate in the social constructions of whiteness.

To be clear, to be white historically has been to prove oneself to endorse and uphold U.S. tenets of white supremacy. To say that the United States was created by and for white people, and anyone not white should expect and be content with second class citizenship. And the tenets of such a system are the racial inferiority of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the right to continental colonization and control of indigenous Americans and the centering of the perspective of a white settler and their descendants as the true and sole narrative through which America can be understood.

To be white in America means that it doesn't really matter where your ancestors came from. What happened in their homeland will play little to no effect in the treatment and opportunities available to their living children today. There is no Whiteland or Whitetopia and thus, being white exists only as a marker of racial privilege. People has fought and killed for the rights of white people to be deemed of inherent worth for existing. And the people who ask this question live on actions that were done so that people who look like them lie at the top of this nation's racial hierarchy. And that won't change unless they actively reject that privilege and work to deconstruct the system of racism that is in place.