How Suitcase sees the poor

The entirety of 105 is an effort to modify how we see the poor. There are rules and codes of conduct that we are meant to internalize in order to visualize and reproduce the realities of poverty as it lines up with how the liberal minded and educated sect of Berkeley society sees it.  But how do the poor see themselves? The development world has helpfully created terms such as welfare queens, the deserving needy versus the undeserving needy, and the passive poor to categorize and feed into the development discourse. However, we don’t have articles or academic papers on how the poor perceive themselves.

I had an experience a few weeks ago in Suitcase Clinic that I’d like to share. A client and I were exchanging our thoughts on the efficacy of Suitcase in alleviating poverty. It started off as it always does in these kinds of conversation. The client was appreciative. He marveled at our kindness and proclaimed that Suitcase was now his second home and that the caseworkers were his family. But the conversation gets more interesting when we come to the issue of caseworker and client interaction. He believed that there is an internalized condescension in the treatment of clients by caseworkers because as educated students, we are inundated by a certain image of poverty. Instead of seeing the poor as lazy and responsible for their plights, we take away their agency and remove them from their personal failings and recast them as people who suffer from the system. The homeless, at least within Suitcase Clinic, are no longer culpable as all their actions, no matter how destructive, are set at the feet of the system and in doing so we infantilize our clients. We baby them and allow them to say or do things that we usually would not allow “ordinary” people to do. This is our version of the poor and it is no truer than the version dreamed up by the academics or the media.

It is true that the pictures we take to depict the poor capture only a segment of their personalities and struggle but we also do them a disservice by the mere act of labeling. We speak for the poor and that should not be so.