I recently watched a youtube video that a friend shared with me, and it really touched me and made my day. I thought I would share it here hoping it will do the same for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UClzYq0T9cM
It's a story about a woman who befriends a homeless man in Brazil. He has a passion for writing so she promises to make a facebook page for his poems. A man comes across the facebook page and realizes that the homeless man is his brother that had been missing for years. He sets out to find his brother and brings him to live with him and his family. After watching this, I thought about living in Berkeley, and how I come across people without homes every day. Clair talked to us recently in our discussion of photography, about generalizing certain groups of people, like drug users for example. I guess I felt guilty after watching this, thinking about how many times I have ignored them when they have asked for money or simply tried to talk to me as I'm rushing to class. I feel like a lot of us (not all of us) generalize the homeless and don't really see them as individuals. How can we stop thinking about the homeless as just the homeless, as if all their faces are blurred into one? I'm not really sure of how I or other Berkeley students can approach the problem of homelessness in a better way.
I studied for a semester in Santiago, Chile, which is a huge city with a large population of homeless people. Coming from Berkeley, I guess I was used to seeing people in the street or asking for money, but I was completely taken by surprise how different the Chileans behave towards the homeless. As you said in your post, many people don't see the homeless people in the streets of Berkeley, or maybe pretend not to. I think this is just a subconscious way of not having to think about them, as they represent a much larger problem which as a city we have still not even come close to solving, which is enough to make many people uncomfortable. In Santiago, however, I found that not only do the people talk to the homeless and listen to their stories, but everyone, literally everyone asked, will give some amount of money to them. To me this was so surprising because of how few people I've ever seen give any money to homeless people in the US. It seems that as a country, the Chileans are very aware of the homeless, and for the most part will always do what they can to help them. Maybe this is a statement on their belief in the government: If the Chileans believe that their government will do nothing to support the homeless, then it makes sense that they would take it upon themselves to do something. Maybe in the US we think of it as the responsibility of the government to take care of the problem of homelessness, and so the people in Berkeley do not feel like it is their place or responsibility to give. Or maybe, it is just that people find it so difficult to relate to the homeless as individual people, as you talked about in your post. It's such a complex problem, but to me it is interesting how it can be treated so differently in different places.
ReplyDeleteYour astute realization of the role of students within the homelessness narrative in Berkeley has sparked in me the realization that I have had many similar questions as well. It has also led to the realization that despite the view of myself as a compassionate individual attempting to produce an equitable society I have often not only generalized the homeless I encounter but additionally placed them into categories that facilitate the level of sympathy through my behavior I impart on these individuals. I base my assumptions on racialized and geographically specific characteristics. I too ignore the individual stories of the homeless in Berkeley to make my own day to day life easier to navigate and in that way I am a direct actor in the reproduction of an equitable society. Thanks for giving me some food for thought.
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