Is being poor a choice?

Is being poor a choice? A lot of times the reason someone's poor, they lose here before they lose anywhere else. Because we all have the same amount of time in a day. I know it sounds cliche, but it's how you're using that time. If you're spending your day and you're not choosing to be productive in any way, it can even be as simple as getting a job. I find that deeply insulting for you to say that it was a choice for me to be poor. So I want to say to all of you, you should check your privilege at the door. I never chose to be poor. No one from my background has ever chosen to be poor. Neither do any demographic that is living in poverty in this nation. We face discrimination on a daily basis and we're doing everything in our power to lift ourselves up by our "bootstraps" as you tell us to. I grew up poor. My mom immigrated from another country. I'm brown. I understand where you're coming from. I do agree that it is harder as a black man to have opportunities, but at the same time, explain all of the black millionaires I know. You don't feel like you have any opportunity? Because you bring up exceptionalism and you try to use yourself and you really insulted me by talking about the color of my skin. You're almost as dark as me because you try to bring up there's other black millionaires. See what you're doing right now is you're trying to talk about anomalies from my community. There's a racial wealth gap that you can't address. You're not an African American and you bringing up a couple millionaires here and there doesn't change the fact that the majority of all the wealth in this nation is in the hands of white people. African Americans here have not gotten any reparations. Wealth has not been passed down from generations. We had to deal with redlining, we had to deal with Jim Crow, we had to deal with, we still to this day! Show us where in our community are these opportunities? Where's the investment? I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree that it's going to be harder. I'm not saying it's going to be as easy as it would be for anyone else. I'm not saying that. But you just said that I chose anomalies, people that are exceptional. Exceptionalism. Do you believe you can be exceptional? I'm not here to represent myself and my exceptionalism. I'm here to represent the unhoused. It's a yes or no question. I understand, but when I go to Skid Row, the data shows and my life experience shows that most of them did not get to, you see like, F*** the data bro. Do you feel like you can be exceptional? It's a yes or no question. And I'm not answering your question. I represent the unhoused. I'm not here to be an anomaly. I'm here to represent the people.