My father is lily white and picked cotton as a child in the 1930’s.
In the 1920's my Dad was an infant laid out on a quilt under a tree next to the cotton field all day with the whole rest of the family picking, including my two aunts who were not even teenagers yet. Of course later on, like your Dad, my Dad was picking cotton himself until he went off to the CCC Camps and then eventually WWII. His "White Privilege" was not starving to death and getting his GED while he was in service. Dad even said they picked in a huge field with a black family working from one end and his family working at the other end to meet in the middle.