&gt; no matter what you do, since you are white, your actions are of less value<p>I&#x27;m saying, no matter what you do, your actions have the <i>same</i> value as anyone else&#x27;s; but if on balance you&#x27;ve benefited from unjust systems, yeah, in my mind your starting point is different.  This is part of how I judge my own accomplishments; I&#x27;m on the &quot;favored&quot; side in most of these systems.<p>It&#x27;s not as simple as &quot;if you&#x27;re white&quot;, since of course there are a lot of unfair systems in place in the world, not just racism.<p>But just in the context of racism -- if Peter Norman had been aboriginal Australian, it seems quite unlikely he would have even been there, and thus never in a position to make a statement anyone would notice in the first place.  Though it&#x27;s hard to say, since this was still around the time the state was deciding it should stop forcibly removing Aboriginal children to be adopted into &quot;proper&quot; homes.<p>Honestly, it&#x27;s a bit weird to me that this idea gets such a negative reaction.  Most people have this as a basic moral principle on a small scale.<p>If you had an awful teacher at school who only liked kids with blue eyes, and he gave you a bag of sweets but nothing to the less-blue-eyed kids, would you feel some duty to share the sweets around on the playground, or would you sit in a corner and eat them all?<p>If you join a card game, notice the dealer is an old friend (and he suggests he can &quot;help&quot; you win a bundle)... do you switch tables, or just figure it&#x27;s your lucky day?<p>On a small&#x2F;simple scale we feel a responsibility to correct small injustices, and to avoid profiting from them.  For larger, longer-lived (and more complicated) injustices... that feeling just tends to go away.