To simplify this comment, when I say "black" I mean "not white". Easier than to keep typing non-white, etc.
You have a quadrant of four categories:
1. Rich and white
2. Poor and white
3. Rich and black
4. Poor and black
You are interpreting the statement to refer to "people who are not (rich or white)" - which with Boolean logic expands to "people who are not rich and not white)". Looking at the first form, this means category 4 (people who are poor AND are not white). It also means that poor white people get this privilege, and rich non-whites do.
The other person is interpreting it as "not (rich and white)" which means all the categories except 1.
in English, comma separated lists of adjectives or other descriptors are almost always understood to have AND between them, not OR. OR must be explicit, otherwise AND is implicitly assumed.
This is not just a matter of two equally valid alternative explanations: a reasonable reading of the original sentence "not poor, not white" (along a minimal amount of thought about the context and subject matter, e.g. prisons clearly are not full of rich blacks) would have easily led to the other person realizing that it was category 4 that the parent was talking about, not 1-3.
To simplify this comment, when I say "black" I mean "not white". Easier than to keep typing non-white, etc.
You have a quadrant of four categories:
1. Rich and white
2. Poor and white
3. Rich and black
4. Poor and black
You are interpreting the statement to refer to "people who are not (rich or white)" - which with Boolean logic expands to "people who are not rich and not white)". Looking at the first form, this means category 4 (people who are poor AND are not white). It also means that poor white people get this privilege, and rich non-whites do.
The other person is interpreting it as "not (rich and white)" which means all the categories except 1.
Hence the confusion.