Rural White Americans | I Grew Up POOR Too, Where's MY Privilege?!

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]I want to talk to somebody specific today.

[00:00:03]Yeah. I want to talk to the white American who grew up poor. I'm talking trailer park poor, single wide poor, government cheese poor, free lunch line, holes in the shoes, lights cut off by the second of the month poor. I'm talking about that. Yeah. See, I see you, honey. I'm not pretending you didn't suffer. I'm not pretending your life was easy. No, not with my videos.

[00:00:30]No. But every time the conversation turns into white privilege, you come into my comments section swinging the same line.

[00:00:41]I grew up poor, too. Where was my privilege? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that cuz see, today we going to answer that question plainly, honestly, and without flinching.

[00:01:00]Now listen, welcome back family. Yes, family. Hey, how y'all doing? How y'all doing? My name is Lesa. I am indeed the people's reporter. All right. Now, I might be new here, but I got a whole lot to say. Now, listen. If you new here, go ahead and click that subscribe button.

[00:01:16]And I'm so glad you're here. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you.

[00:01:20]Wakanda forever. Welcome. And if you are a subscriber, let me tell y'all something. Y'all been showing out. Okay, y'all been showing out. I've show been appreciated. Y'all took me from 5,000 to 8,000 subscribers. No, I didn't say million.

[00:01:35]I said thousand. And I just want to say I am so appreciative of you. Now, let's get into it. Now, you know, we don't do sanitized over here. Okay? So, we gonna take this one slow because somebody out there needs to hear it slow. Okay? Now, picture this with me if you will. So, let's take a walk in a day. Two kids, same street, same broke. One white, one black, same hand-me-down clothes, same empty refrigerator, same mama working two jobs, same daddy who ain't there.

[00:02:08]Uh-huh. Yeah. Their poverty is identical in that moment. Nobody is taking that away from the white kid. Nobody. But here is what people seem to constantly miss. Poverty is not the only thing shaping a child's life. And when that white child, even broke, even hungry, even hurting, was not carrying the same set of weights the black child was carrying at the same time.

[00:02:39]Now, let me show you what I mean. Take a walk with me through this day. Same poor neighborhood, same year. Now, watch this. Okay. Both kids walk into the corner store. The clerk follows the black kid, not the white kid. Same empty pockets, different treatment. H both kids act up in school. The white kid is a handful. The black kid is a thug. And the data on the suspensions starts in preschool. Preschool, y'all. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:09]Yeah. Three and four year olds. They already been marked as a thug. Now, fast forward. Both kids grow up. They put in the same job application, same resume, same zip code, same everything except the name at the top. Now, the white name, Josh, gets the call back. The black name, Deshawn doesn't. Yeah, that's not an opinion. That's a controlled experiment run over and over and over again for 50 years. Look it up.

[00:03:39]Now, both men, grown, get pulled over on the same road, same speed. The white man gets a warning. The black man gets a search, a ticket, an arrest, or worse.

[00:03:51]Same road, same speed, different outcomes.

[00:03:57]Both want to buy a house, even cheap, even ugly, even a fixer upper. But somewhere back in the family tree, the white family had the option to buy in neighborhoods where the black family was legally forbidden from. That's red lining. And that wasn't slavery times.

[00:04:14]Yeah, that was the 30s all the way through the 70s. The houses the white family could buy gained value. The houses that the black families were forced into did not. And that, my dear, that right there is where most middle class wealth in this country comes from.

[00:04:32]See, comes from the house that your grandparents bought. Maybe for 5,000, it's worse. I don't know. The poor white kid may not have inherited a dime, but somewhere in his bloodline, somebody had the choice.

[00:04:48]And my bloodline and for most American history, that choice was against the law. And in some cases, it's still against the unwritten law.

[00:04:59]Yeah.

[00:05:00]Now, hear me and hear me clearly. Hear me what I say. That is privilege. Not money, not ease, not you had it good, not you didn't suffer. Privilege means all of the things that were hard about your life. And I know they were hard, honey. Being white wasn't one of them.

[00:05:23]Okay? The factory closing, real. The pills that came after, real. The dad who left, real. The school that failed you, real. the hospital that shut its doors.

[00:05:35]All of it's real. But on top of all of that, you didn't also have the country watching you like a criminal from the day you were born. You didn't also have your name cost you the interview. You didn't also have to teach your son how to come home alive after a traffic stop.

[00:05:56]You see, that is the one thing you didn't have to carry at all. See, that's the whole claim. That's all white privilege has ever meant. And anybody telling you that it means anything else is selling you some Plain and simple. Raw and unadulterated.

[00:06:16]Okay.

[00:06:20]Now, let me tell you why this lie keeps working. All right. Now, hold on. Hold on, honey. Hold on. Hold on. When you, the poor white American, hear the word privilege, you don't hear what I just said, do you?

[00:06:33]You hear your pain doesn't count. I never said that. I never said that. That indeed is a wound. Because for a lot of poor white folk in this country, your pain hasn't been counted. The factories closed, nobody came. The pills came, nobody came. The schools collapsed, nobody came. So when privilege enters the conversation, it feels like the last thing being taken from you is the acknowledgment that life was hard. So let me say this clearly. All right? Your suffering counts. It's real. All right?

[00:07:10]Nobody serious is saying otherwise.

[00:07:14]And and this is the part that they don't want you to hear. Your suffering and the black family down the road suffering have a common cause. You see? And that cause is not each other.

[00:07:30]Okay? It's the people who shut the factory, who wrote the trade deal, who busted the union, who flooded your town with the pills, and then pointed at the black family across the tracks and told you they the ones who took it from you.

[00:07:46]They do it every election season. Okay.

[00:07:48]Yeah, that move is older than this whole damn country. All right. In 1676, write that year down, poor white indentured servants and enslaved Africans in Virginia burned James Town to the ground together, side by side, because they figured out who was actually robbing them. You see, and in the years right after that uprising, the colonial elite sat down and passed a wave of new laws.

[00:08:15]See, they invented a category. They called it white. And they handed the poor white man one thing.

[00:08:23]Not land, not money, not freedom from being broke. Not at all. They gave him a position above the black man and a job to keep him there. Ice. Ha. That deal has been on the table for nearly 400 years. Bookie. Okay. And the poor white American who refused to see his privilege today is not a villain. It's not a villain. He's a target of the longest running political operation in American history. Okay? And the operation only works as long as he you cannot see it.

[00:09:00]Now, how long we got to scream at the mountain tops for you to be able to understand it? Well, let me continue cuz I don't think you still get it. Okay.

[00:09:08]Now, somebody watching this is going to say, "Yeah, that's ancient history.

[00:09:12]1676, the Bacons Rebellion. Yeah, that was almost 400 years ago. What does that have to do with me? Oh, I'm so glad you asked, Bookie. I'm so glad you asked.

[00:09:23]Because the deal didn't end. The deal just got updated. That's all. Fast forward to 1964, for example. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. 1965, the Voting Rights Act. For the first time in American history, the federal government says out loud that black people are full citizens. Full stop. Okay. On paper. And the White South, which had voted Democrat since the Civil War, flips almost overnight.

[00:09:55]Why, do you ask? I'm glad you did.

[00:09:58]Because a Republican political operator named Kevin Phillips looked at the map and saw an opportunity. And Richard Nixon ran with it. They called it the Southern Strategy. Yeah. And it was nothing more than the 1676 Bacon's Rebellion deal repackaged for television. That's all. You couldn't say the N-word on the campaign trail anymore. The country wouldn't accept it.

[00:10:26]So you said other things instead. You said law and order. You said states rights. You said forced busing. You said welfare queens. You said tough on crime.

[00:10:43]You said inner city. And you said thugs.

[00:10:49]And every one of those phrases was a wink. And the base understood every single one. And don't take my word for it. In 1981, a Republican strategist named Lee Atwater. Yeah. The same man who would go on to run George HW Bush's campaign sat down for an interview. He thought it was off the record.

[00:11:13]It wasn't.

[00:11:16]And on that tape, he laid the whole thing out in his own voice. Yeah. He said, and I'm cleaning this up for YouTube. Okay. By 1968, you couldn't say the N-word out loud anymore. So, you say forced busing, you say states rights, you say cutting taxes, and then he said, listen to this. A byproduct of all of that is black folks get hurt worse than white folks. Uh-huh. Yeah. See, that's a Republican strategist on tape in his own words telling you to play. Now, what was the play?

[00:11:57]Take the language of policy, pour the old poison through it. So now the racist message reaches you on the evening news without anybody having to slay say a slur out loud. So now the man who is robbing you, the politician who was voting against your union, against your health care, against your kids schools, against your Medicaid gets your vote anyway because he pointed at the black face on the TV screen and said they the problem. Trump.

[00:12:29]Okay. Reagan launched his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Now, look that up. That's the town where the three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. And he stood right there and talked about states rights. Coincidence?

[00:12:46]I think not. In a in a country this big with this many towns, you better come on. You better you better stop. See, that's when white rule south and a whole lot of rural white America outside the south got locked into voting for the very people Robin Bell. Yeah. Because every two years, every four years, somebody points at a black face and says, "They took it from you. It's them.

[00:13:13]It's them." And we're immigrants. It's them. And every two years and every four years, the factory stays closed. The wages stay flat. Seven and a quarter.

[00:13:21]The bills keep coming. The hospitals keep closing and the schools keep failing, baby. Yeah, but you voted against the black face one more time.

[00:13:32]And the man in the suit went back to the W to Washington and cut another tax for the people who shut your factory down.

[00:13:40]Ain't no manufacturing jobs coming, baby. That, my dear, is indeed the southern strategy. Same deal as 1676.

[00:13:49]New names, new cameras, same robbery.

[00:13:52]See, that's what you don't seem to get time and time again.

[00:13:57]Now, so if you take nothing else from me today, take this one sentence, okay?

[00:14:07]Privilege doesn't mean your life wasn't hard. It means simply your race wasn't one of the things that made it harder.

[00:14:17]Say it back. Sit with it. Let it marinate and let it work on you. Okay?

[00:14:22]Because the day enough poor white folks and everybody else in this country, immigrants, black folks, whatever, look at each other and say, "Wait a minute.

[00:14:31]Hold up. Uh-uh. We got the same cotton picking enemy like the Panthers did.

[00:14:35]That's the day that everything changes."

[00:14:38]See, they spent 400 years making sure that that day doesn't come. Now, the question on the table is the only one that matters.

[00:14:50]The question is whether we going to let them get to 401.

[00:14:56]Well, everybody, my name is Lesa. I am indeed the people's reporter. It has been a pleasure to share this information with you. Okay? And again, if you're new here, welcome, welcome.

[00:15:08]And if you are a faithful subscriber, thank you, thank you, thank you, cuz like I said, y'all showing out and I really appreciate y'all. All right. So, uh, you know me, huh? Say it with me.

[00:15:19]Say it with me. What? Bam. Power to the people. The people.

[00:15:26]When we do that, everything changes.

[00:15:31]And I need to tell you, there's enough money out here for everybody. Okay. All right.