You wrote: “ you are not responsible for your ancestor’s actions, but why is it fair for you to benefit from the overwhelming privilege of your ancestor’s actions?”
My ancestors did not have any privilege, much less “overwhelming privilege.” I’ve described a bit of my own ancestry here, if you’re interested:
Most white people here in America today aren’t descendants of slaveholders but children of immigrants who largely came here in flight from various forms of political or economic oppression, whether it be the Irish potato famine, communism in Eastern Europe, fleeing the Nazis during World War II or whatever else.
So if what you’re after is making sure children don’t start with a huge leg up in the way of inherited privilege, what you need to do is start focusing on class rather than race. The overwhelming majority of white people in America live just above the poverty line. Forget white people. They’re not your enemy. Most of them are victims of history, just like people of every other race. If you don’t want to allow inherited privilege to accumulate, your focus should be on things like the inheritance/Estate tax and other methods for evading inheritance taxation, university legacy admissions, school choice (which results in rich people taking their kids out of the public system and sending them, instead, to elite private schools, while the public system suffers from neglect and loss of the parents who would otherwise have been its most wealthy and powerful advocates) and other phenomena of this sort.
So there are plenty of things you can do to fight inherited privilege. Demonizing white people isn’t one of those things. That’s just over-broad racism in search of scapegoats.
