The Problem Is You

This morning, a pair of researchers from the University of Houston and Boston University published a piece in the Washington Post about the results of a study of 861 Americans on their attitudes toward the homeless.

We uncovered a strange pattern. On one hand, majorities support both aid (60 percent) and subsidized housing (65 percent), with only a small percentage opposing these policies — by 19 and 17 percent, respectively. On the other, a majority supports banning panhandling (52 percent) and a plurality supports banning sleeping in public (46 percent) — while only about a quarter of the public opposes these policies, by 23 and 30 percent, respectively.

The reason for the discrepancy:

Disgust is a key component of what psychology often calls the “behavioral immune system” — a set of psychological mechanisms that help prevent contact with pathogens. Our behavioral immune system is overly cautious, however. We tend to perceive others who look atypical as potential sources of disease. Homeless people often lack access to proper health care and sanitation, and they are often covered by the media (emphasis mine) in ways that refer to disease. As a result, they may be perceived as pathogen threats.

Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum read this, and — needing to meet his quota on a Friday afternoon, as the Friday cat blog will only take you so far — dumped out some thoroughly inhumane and stupid thoughts.

The researchers solved their conundrum by suggesting that most people are disgusted by the homeless. No kidding. About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that. (Emphasis also mine.) Is that really so hard to get?

“None of this means we can’t or shouldn’t have empathy for the homeless. Of course we should, if we want to call ourselves decent human beings. In fact, overcoming reflexive feelings is what makes us decent human beings in the first place,” Drum continues. “There’s just no need to deny that these reflexes are both innate and perfectly understandable.”

Drum’s specialty is doing 300-word quick hits where he takes a piece of news, quotes it, and then tells you what he thinks about it. This is a job that millions of people do for free on Twitter; even by those standards, however, Drum gives this topic a fraction of a fraction of the critical thinking it deserves.

To start, substance abuse and mental health aren’t the only reasons, or even the main reasons, that people become homeless. In 2015, the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that, among cities surveyed, the main causes of homelessness for families was the lack of affordable housing, poverty, unemployment, and low paying jobs, followed by family disputes, evictions, and domestic violence. Among the “unaccompanied” homeless, the main causes were lack of affordable housing and poverty, followed by mental health issues and then substance abuse. (As an aside: although your employment situation has little to do with your worth as a human being, it’s also worth pointing out that many homeless people have full time jobs.)

The class factors involved in homelessness should be obvious enough, but it’s also caused by institutional racism. As the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness found in 2010, “one out of every 141 persons in Black families stayed in a homeless shelter, a rate seven times higher when compared with persons in white families (one in 990).”

Aside from the flaw of believing that this behavior is human nature: who cares if they are addicted to drugs, or — God forbid — they have a mental health issue that’s out of their control? Drum’s belief that it’s natural to have a “reflexive disgust” of people who do a lot of drugs, drink too much, or have a mental health issue is based on the premise that the current year is 1986. It is not. We live in a time where people have never been more open about their problems; most American adults have at least one parent, sibling, good friend, or cousin who has dealt with substance abuse or a mental health crisis. (For example: I’m 27, and I’ve known no less than four friends or acquaintances who are now dead because of heroin. None of them were homeless.)

It’s also the case that people develop mental health issues and substance abuse problems because of homelessness. Put yourself in the position of someone with nothing who lives every day being looked at as less than human. Who wouldn’t develop mental (or physical) health issues as a result of that, or turn to something else to alleviate the suffering?

Contrary to the idea that Drum’s own reaction is “reflexive,” the revulsion that some people feel towards the homeless — as well as people who live in affordable housing — isn’t caused by some gene that’s inherent to all of us. It’s a societal disgust that has existed throughout our history, and it’s caused by a number of factors, particularly by the criminalization of poor people and people of color. People like Drum — who lives in a city that had a median income of over $93,000 as of 2015— live in decent neighborhoods where weed is being smoked, cocaine is being snorted, and heroin is being injected every day, but the police are simply not a presence in their daily lives until they see them arresting someone who’s unlucky enough to be poor or Black or poor and Black, even if they’re doing something as innocuous as asking for money or sleeping on a park bench.

These things are all connected because we live in a trash society which constantly reinforces — through our criminal underfunding of public services, through bad policing practices, and through media narratives, as the researchers themselves noted — the idea that poor people deserve their suffering. Instead of confronting why things are like this, however, Drum consoles his audience at Mother Jones by telling them it’s perfectly normal to shit your pants when you see a homeless person out of some irrational fear that they might get their problems on you.

Like so much of Drum’s writing, the click-driving premise of this piece is that a bad thing is actually good or vice versa. And like so many of the bloggers who do this kind of thing, it’s predicated on the belief that the best writing “challenges” readers. It’s a bad mix: of course it’s impossible for Drum to get into the nuances of all of this in the three paragraphs he spends on it, but if that’s the case, then maybe don’t write the fucking piece.

But he did write the fucking piece, and what we did get out of it was pointless and actively harmful contrarianism that failed to challenge anyone, much less the system that creates and exacerbates these problems. Over half of MotherJones.com visitors report having an investment portfolio worth over $51,000, it’s probably a safe assumption to make that more of his readers than not will agree wholeheartedly. Drum thinks he’s confronting his audience with the hard truth; in reality he’s just reassuring them that it’s perfectly normal and human to have these behaviors.

This behavior, however, is neither. It’s learned and it’s wrong. And being honest about that is the only way to have a chance at a society where the way people personally treat the homeless catches up with their beliefs about what we should do; not just to help the homeless, but to eradicate homelessness itself.

Thanks to my Patreon supporters for enabling me to do timely work like this. If you like what you read and want to help me self-publish more pieces like this, you can subscribe here.