I don't really know how to explain my point in any different or clearer words, but I'll give it one more try. Please read the whole thing and try to give it the most generous possible interpretation you can.

The parent did not claim that poverty is not faced by white people. What the parent actually claimed that systemic forces that create poverty are not faced by white people.

That is a specific issue which only non-white people face. As a consequence, the people facing that issue are disproportionately likely to be further affected by class-specific issues like high cost education.

They did not say that poverty or high-cost education is exclusively a race issue. They did not say that only people who face such systemic forces can experience poverty, or suffer due to high cost education. Obviously, anyone can experience poverty and anyone can suffer due to high-cost education. But it's worth considering that high-cost education especially affects black and hispanic people, because those people face systemic forces which push them toward poverty, whereas white people do not face those systemic forces. So if you care about racial equity, you should care about low-cost education. That's it. That's the entirety of the claim being made here.

That doesn't mean high-cost education only affects black/hispanic people. It doesn't mean that only black people deserve affordable education. It doesn't mean that only black people can be held back from success due to socioeconomic reasons. It doesn't mean that we only need to be considering the impact that high cost education has on black people. Nobody here is making any of those claims. All they are saying is that there is a specific barrier which non-white people face, and that barrier is being disproportionately affected by poverty for systemic reasons. No white person faces that specific barrier, period. They might face other barriers that have the same effect of preventing them from being successful in higher education, such as poverty in a general sense, and we should be considering those barriers too, but they just do not happen to face this specific barrier of being pushed into poverty by systemic forces.

Nowhere did the parent claim that those systemic forces are the only possible barrier to success in higher education, or even that it's the most substantial or important barrier. It just happens to be one specific barrier worth looking at, and this one specific barrier happens to only faced by non-white people. There are other barriers to success in higher education which white people do face, and they never claimed otherwise. They were just making an emotional appeal to the specific racial nature of this one particular barrier. White people may still face the barrier of poverty in a general sense, as well as others in addition to that, just not the specific barrier of being systemically pushed into poverty.

> Class barriers are by-definition about class, not race.

Sorry, what I meant here is racial barriers preventing people from escaping the lower class. Not barriers that apply to a specific class.

> That they may be problematic at differing rates makes them no less of a general problem, so at what point why even involve race in the conversation? Because it will get some subset even more riled up?

Why is it a bad thing to show the specific ways in which issues like poverty can affect our own personal communities, families, friends etc? Having that emotional connection to the problem might help people to see it in its full light.