I am somebody.

As a college student, I was obsessed with music, film, and the sixties. It was inevitable that I would end up watching Wattstax.

Jesse Jackson opened the event with a speech that stuck with me over two decades. It's the first thing I thought of when I heard of his passing.

On its surface, it was a speech for the Black crowd attending Wattstax and the eventual audience of the documentary. But the words weren't meant for uplifting of Black people alone. It never felt that way to me.

My family is a mix of Hispanic immigrants and Appalachian hillbillies. Groups that have been marginalized--still are--by media, society, and economics. While these groups have had privileges that the Black community does not, it was not lost on me that the poor and others of America crawl out of the same place.

Many forget about the history of our families. That we--before the boom of post-war America--scraped by. We sit now as college-educated citizens with halfway decent pay, discussing the morality of pulling ourselves up by their bootstraps. We tell ourselves we're different. We tell ourselves we're not like them. We tell ourselves these lies because we fear, we know, that we are a misstep away from poverty again.

When Jesse Jackson talked about the Black struggle, there is no doubt that is what he was talking about, first and foremost. But in those words are also the struggles of nearly every person in the U.S. Poverty, education, prison, loss, pain, belief in yourself.

When BLM became a point of conversation, it became clear that people had othered themselves from Black people so much that it was offensive to think that talking about Black lives was talking about all lives.

Ultimately, we all fall under the boot. We feel the weight and struggle every day, week, and year. Despite all of that, we are all somebody.

Jesse Jackson understood that.