I’m a hillbilly. I’m 50% poor white trash by birth and I spent my childhood in the rural South in the shadow of the Appalachians. That scrawny, barefoot girl with ringworm selling melons at the roadside stand? That was me.

As an adult, I have spent some time trying to serve prisoners and ex-offenders, which, where I live now (and everywhere else), means, largely, poor black men. A lot has been written about the viciousness and racism of our criminal justice system, the conditions of grinding poverty in our inner cities, and the violence of both. It’s all true. In my opinion, America’s brutality to black and brown people can hardly be overstated.

When you advocate for prisoners’ rights, you are arguing for the basic humanity of everyone, regardless of who they are and what they’ve done. As humans, they deserve decent food, housing, and healthcare, reasonable pay, and educational , social, and recreational opportunities. There is an essential human dignity that society must respect and support without exception.

But some crimes are hard to get around. And some people are just flat out horrible. Doesn’t matter. No exceptions.

If I can hug the neck of a black person who stabbed another mother’s child in the heart and tell them that they deserve to be treated humanely… then I can do the same damn thing to a poor white redneck who voted for Donald Trump. And guess what? Advocating for the dignity and humanity of prisoners doesn’t make me a murderer. Advocating for the dignity and humanity of the white working class doesn’t make me a racist.

Everybody in the boat. No exceptions. Nobody left behind.

Hate the sin all you want, but love the sinner. We are all, to some extent, the products of our environment. It is nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault that our cultural environment looks less like love and more like Love Canal.

With that said, there are some people who deserve more of the blame than others. The powerless, by definition, don’t shape the world to the same degree as the powerful.

The popular liberal narrative right now is that our society is controlled by white men. This has some truth to it, but only very generally, and only to a point. A poor white man might be better off than a poor black man, but neither one is running the world.

White plantation owners were more responsible, in every meaningful way, for chattel slavery than white sharecroppers. The moral character of sharecroppers — good or bad — was mostly irrelevant to the formation of that evil institution.

Your average poor white hillbilly has almost no power as an individual to, say, end police brutality. And, historically, when white hillbillies are good, when they rise up beside their black brothers and sisters to fight for universal rights, they are shot down beside them too.

Who is on the other side of the guns? Who are the plantation owners now? Who is enforcing the status quo?

You can call them the establishment, the elites, or the ruling class. They’re the people the law works for and not against. If you can make millions dumping 4,000,000 opioid pills into a town of 400 souls in West Virginia, you are a member of the ruling class. If you’re doing 6–12 years in prison for distributing some tiny fraction of those same drugs or lying in a grave from taking them, you aren’t.

These elites mostly don’t care about the immiseration of the many. They are either willfully ignorant of their own body counts or they are sociopaths. From the hollers of West Virginia or the streets of Compton, the Ivy League looks like a finishing school for banal evil.

As for our government overseers, the people who could end the police state in black and brown communities, who could address poverty and despair in Appalachia? For the most part, they don’t. Not the democrats who run the big cities, not the republicans who run the small towns. For the most part, they refuse to lead on these issues at all. MLK demanded an end to police brutality and 15 (constant) dollars an hour in 1963. How much longer are we supposed to wait while these fools incrementally flop around in circles? Meanwhile, the rolling disaster rolls on.

And the white thumb-sucking pundit class? You who are so quick to scream “racist” and point your fingers at hillbillies? Get over yourselves. Tweeting #BlackLivesMatter doesn’t make you Rosa Parks.

Yes, there are racists in them thar hills, but let’s be clear: the ruling class grinds black and brown and poor people under the boot from sea to shining sea and most Americans acquiesce. Spend a day with the 21% of New Yorkers living below the federal poverty line. Take a trip to Rikers Island. See the damage white moderates can do.

There may be moral high ground there, but none of us are anywhere near the mountaintop.

I don’t know how to cure racism. I don’t know how to end poverty. But I’m pretty sure the solutions have to start with respecting and supporting each other’s humanity, deeply flawed though we may all be. We don’t have to accept the unacceptable. We can be hard on issues. But we have to be soft on people.

Damn right, it’s a purity test. Rights that aren’t universal aren’t rights at all. Everybody in the boat. No exceptions.