How about the Irish famine? My great grandfather came here at the age of 8 in 1850 on a ship from county Kerry to New Orleans because his family didn’t have the fair for the ships to New York. They worked their way up the Mississippi to where he and his brothers became teamsters and then farmers. Owning land was their goal and education.
My other ancestors had similar histories. My mother, born in 1915, was the first to graduate from college. When I was the third of his three children to get an advanced degree, my dad who came of age in the great depression, sat down and cried.
Yep. I and my cousin are the first of our family to go to college. My grandparents were subsistence farmers. Worked like dogs into their late 70s. I grew up poor, on a dirt road, used the GI Bill to put myself through college and am still paying the student loan on grad school. I haven’t noticed being white helping me.