This is survivorship bias at its finest.

Again, I'm against victimhood. I encourage everybody, no matter their circumstances, to believe in themselves and their own agency. Mainly because, whether it's fair or not, life rarely gives us any other choice.

But to look at people less fortunate than yourself and decide they're where they are because they didn't try as hard as you is a terrible (and selfish and inaccurate) way to look at the world. You have all kinds of advantages that got you where you are today. Your "can do" attitude is built on them. And is indeed one of them.

Maybe you'd agree with me when I say that one of the best things we can do is try to instil a "can do" attitude in other people too. But again, what some other people have to do to succeed is far harder than the things you or I have to do. Because they start in a different place. And the issue with race is that some African Americans start in that place because of centuries of deliberate, government-level discrimination, the enforcement of which only ended 60 years ago. An inability or unwillingness to recognise that is pretty much the dictionary definition of privilege.

And I'm not even talking about white privilege there. One key area of confusion seems to be that institutional racism affects all black people equally. Or that all black people must be struggling because of how racist America was until fairly recently. But that's clearly not true. Plenty of black people do just fine in America today. Plenty of white people don't.

But what you're missing is the experiences of people whose lives are different to yours. You don't take seriously the fact that you're lucky (or at least not unlucky) in a whole bunch of ways. So am I. We've been able to make the most of the opportunities in our lives. That’s great. That doesn't mean that everybody who is struggling is just a whiny victim.