Yes, of course. The point I'm making is that seeing this as "black people are under the bus" is the wrong way to frame this. Black people are not a homogenous group who are all in the same position. This is obvious even if you just look at FBA vs immigrants. The issue is poverty, or perhaps more precisely, socio-economic challenge. Not skin tone.
As I've written in the past, treating skin tone as a synonym for disadvantage ends up privileging rich people of colour instead of helping the people of colour who most need help and empowering the people whose perspectives would be most helpful in boosting genuine diversity. There's a whole stratum of people who are completely overlooked because they never even get access to proper education or opportunity or a path through early life that doesn't involve crime or drugs. These people are disproportionately people of colour. But some of them are white too.
These are the people who are under the bus. Efforts to help these people would do so much more to lift up the bottom 20%. And best of all, there's no need to quibble about race. The most frustrating thing is that Martin Luther King said all of this sixty years ago:
"The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities. In asking for something special, the Negro is not seeking charity. He does not want to languish on welfare rolls any more than the next man. He does not want to be given a job he cannot handle. Neither, however, does he want to be told that there is no place where he can be trained to handle it. So with equal opportunity must come the practical, realistic aid which will equip him to seize it. Giving a pair of shoes to a man who has not learned to walk is a cruel jest.
Today, special measures are needed to alleviate the economic conditions of Negroes and all other persons in a family unit which earns less than $3,000 a year. [...]
While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill. The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery. Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth. It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market [...]
It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, applicable to white and Negro families alike with annual incomes of less than $3,000, could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty."
