You benefit by living in a prosperous country that was in part built on the backs of people who were enslaved or egregiously mistreated. Personally I have no d

You benefit by living in a prosperous country that was in part built on the backs of people who were enslaved or egregiously mistreated. Personally I have no direct connection to much of that because all my ancestors arrived in the US around 1900. My point is you can't extricate what the US is today from what was done to people in order to make it what it is today. I still indirectly benefit. I think my ancestors benefited from having white skin in the US as opposed to dark skin, when they arrived. > Just being part white and alive today means your ancestors won lots of fights over thousands of years. Being white has nothing to do with it. Everyone's ancestors probably did terrible things if you go back far enough. That's not the point. You're not guilty and you don't need to feel guilty. But you should at least be aware of how the modern context in which you live was derived. It was derived from the suffering of others. How far back do we need to go? I don't think it matters, really, but just as far as is substantially relevant to the present. So for the US today, I'd say it's worth considering at least as far back as the founding of the country because we can still draw direct lines from the way things are today to events that happened from then until now. I mean, it was only in 1967 that many people realistically gained the right to vote, unfettered from schemes like poll taxes and more which were used to disenfranchise them. > How far back in history are you willing to go, to make everyone feel guilty? The goal is not to make anyone feel guilty. And there's no benefit in delving through ancient history. Because many of the problems that still exist in this country today are persistent effects of what happening in what is really only very recent history. Do Italians need to feel bad about the Romans keeping slaves? I don't think so, I think it would be a stretch to say that modern Italian society was built by the slaves of Romans, let alone the Romans themselves. But if you look around the US today you can easily find buildings that are still in use, sometimes in their original capacity, that were built by enslaved people. So I think it's still relevant. Likewise you can find the direct ancestors of native people who were forcibly displaced and mistreated, and by direct ancestors I mean really only a handful of generations, still very much recent, by historical standards.