Do you know any poor white people?

[Famous Mortimer]

The difference between being poor and white and poor and black is, if you are poor and white, and you DO somehow leave the ghetto, you LEAVE the ghetto.  You can wipe the dust from your feet and be done with it.  When you're black in this country, because we live in a racist society, you never, ever, truly leave the ghetto.  The assumptions about you that are embedded in our culture linger just beneath the surface, when they aren't simply laid bare.

To be a person of color in this country means no matter how wealthy or successful you are, you are never free from the bull****.

Seriously, what does this melodramatic BS even mean? Do you mean, even if a Black person is rich, they're "still in the ghetto" because if they're walking down a street at night, someone crosses the street to avoid them? No, if you're rich, you're rich. Even if a salesperson asks you if they can help you find anything (which they also ask White people) you are still rich.

[Famous Mortimer]

Spokane has plenty of poor white people. Logan neighborhood downtown in one of those "don't walk at night" neighborhoods (though Spokane has quite nice parts, too). But as you head from Spokane eastward, it gets more and more redneck-y. Liberty Lake is a step down, and then you hit State Line and its nothing but Cabella's and trailer parks until you get to Coeur d'Alene itself, which is an all right town.

I think the operative word here is "redneck-y". The rednecks aren't poor; in fact, they're often quite well off. They're enjoy putting things in their yard that we normals consider to be low-class or, for lack of a better word, "white trash" cultural items. I know this because I'm friends with someone from a family like this: they own a sizeable amount of property and own a few small businesses but their lawncare is very lacking and they don't maintain their house in a manner that's "respectable". They don't have health insurance. They're not poor though.

Only reasonably affluent people shop at Cabella's btw. My family is well-off but they think Cabella's is "too expensive" and "for rich people". Ultimately, what I'm getting at, is that what people who live in Seattle or New York or Los Angeles consider to be "white poverty" is frequently rooted in misguided stereotypes. So-called "rednecks" are rarely poor.

White trash aren't poor, they can afford refrigerators and cell phones.

[Famous Mortimer]

So all that was just a way to say that White people can't be poor because they own houses? Houses, especially McMansions in the middle of nowhere like poor White people own, are worth a lot of money on paper but basically impossible to sell unless you're willing to take a loss. You take away the "value" of these houses and White people are just as poor as minorities. Most studies confirm this, the media usually covers them as "Average White Family Worth 100K More than Black Family" but then read, and yeah, it's all because of crappy houses, they don't have 100k laying around.

Also the argument that you can't be poor and own a small business is stupid. Otherwise there's a lot of Afghan fried chicken joint owners in New York who have lots of "material capital".