> Although, it is wrong to call it pro-white, and the pro-white narrative comes from the ideology that I was criticizing. It is anti-black and anti-poor.

I think it's both pro-white and anti-black. When you dig back through US history, you see plenty of evidence of both a belief system that whites are the best (and thus deserve to have power over other races) as well as that blacks are particularly deserving of their lowest status. Other races and ethnicities form a more complex middle ground. In many places and times there simply weren't a great enough quantity of those members of those groups for any well-defined cultural claim to be made.

I don't think your average 19th century Virginia farmer had a strong opinion one way or the other about the relatively inferiority of, say, the Sami people because they'd never even heard of one. Whites in almost all parts of the US by necessity had to incorporate blackness into their culture because—thanks almost entirely to the slave trade—blacks were so present in much of the country and were enshrined in its laws and institutions.

> As an example, in what way are institutions biased in favor of poor rural white people?

"Poor", "rural", and "white" are three ways to slice demographics and the way they interact can sometimes illuminate and sometimes obscure.

I think most of what you're seeing is that it generally sucks to be poor and rural, full stop. In 1910, there were about 13 million US farm workers. Today there are about 3 million. In 1979, there were close to 20 million manufacturing jobs. Today it's around 12 million.

This disproportionally hurts whites because black people have historically concentrated in urban areas (often driven by trying to escape anti-black racism). So it's easy to have a vivid image of how much it sucks for some opioid addicted country-music blaring coal-rolling white dude living in a trailer in Appalachia compared to some hip black guy riding the subway in NYC listening to billionaire Kanye's latest album.

But that's comparing different cohorts. The real question is what is it like for a poor, rural, black person? Black people make up only 3% of the population of West Virginia, but 28% of its prison population. (Whites are 93% of the state, but 65% of prisoners.)

Meanwhile in NYC, black people are 16% of the state population but 53% of its prison population. The median household income for white people is $80,300, for black people it's $42,600.

So, yes, I agree that poor rural folks have gotten the short end of the stick since neoliberalism took over. And their perception of relative worsening is something that we should look at. (I think it's one of the primary drivers of the Tea Party, Trumpism, the alt-right, etc.) While their anger at black people is misplaced and wrong, I can empathize with where it's coming from. It hurts to feel that others are moving ahead while you yourself are not.

But at the same time, it has always been hard to be black in the US and it's still hard. Here's a fun (spoiler: not fucking fun at all) guessing game to play if you don't already know the answer: When was the last lynching in the United States?

If you were naive, you might guess the late 1800s when Jim Crow laws were rife and the country was still coming to grips with emancipation. Maybe you'd guess the 1930s when the KKK was flourishing. You would hope it wasn't the 1950s when economic prosperity and blacks and whites fighting together in WWII should have brought us together. Hopefully no later than the 1960s when the Civil Rights Act was signed.

Actually, it was 1981. His name was Michael Donald. He was 19 years old and was chosen at random by KKK members angry about an unrelated murder trial "to show Klan strength in Alabama".

He was killed by poor rural whites who were this close to getting away with it completely until the FBI got involved.