[Mz]

I also think a lot of you are being uncharitable:

I am sorry you are feeling ganged up on, but I am an individual, not part of some group "lot of you." I am a medically handicapped woman with a shitty life who just likes talking with people and that's it. I was in no way judging you as an individual and I started out with stating that I have sympathy for some of your points.

But as a woman who has really had to deal with a lot of shit on HN and gets told all the time that I am basically imagining things, and as a homeless person who has very much experienced classism and exclusion while homeless, I think that "small percentage" that is attributable to the color of their skin is significant and not to be dismissed.

I try really hard to talk about just treating all people decently and in some places that gets my remarks routinely deleted. I am a white woman and part of my so-called "white privilege" is that I have a predominantly white genetic disorder that is the root cause of my poverty and homelessness and I get a whole lot of fuck you over that. With being homeless, I am presumed incompetent and people tell me to go seek out charity and are incredibly dismissive of my attempts to try to figure out how to establish an earned income that works for me in spite of my medical situation.

There are a lot of things I have dealt with in the last few years that are a huge head fuck and often make me suicidal because I feel strongly that my financial problems should not be anywhere near as bad as they are and are made far worse by classism and the assumption that a homeless person must be a total fucking loser with nothing of value to offer. And there are times when this just seems like an impossible trap that cannot be escaped.

I expect that I will escape it, but I have my moments where it just feels really hopeless because of the shitty attitudes and behaviors of other people unnecessarily compounding my problems.

So how do you propose to magically solve their poverty if that is "the real issue"? Because from where I sit as a homeless person, that comes across as an excuse to not deal with racism, which is real and does have an impact.

And maybe you can stop for a minute and think about how you are lumping me and others together because we happened to have all spoken to you in this one discussion and aren't all in agreement with you and that's the basis for this grouping and accusation that we all, as a group, are being uncharitable. And then wonder what that says about the personal experiences shaping people of color and other groups who do not know how to separate their color or other traits from persistent poverty.

If you have no solution for that poverty, how useful is it to say that is the "real" problem?

Thank you for replying.

[SomeStupidPoint]

The comment about being uncharitable was more part of the wider context of my comments, not directed at you in particular. (There were some common threads to complaints about my posts; I wanted to address them one place so I could reference it. The medium gives a certain incentive to "speak to the crowd" so your posts read as a consistent voice, rather than several conversations.)

> I think that "small percentage" that is attributable to the color of their skin is significant and not to be dismissed

It's not nothing, that's true. However, it's a smaller effect this decade than it was last decade, and the one before that. So it's going away if we just stay the course. We've got that problem not solved, but solving. (Well, as far as I can tell from the data, anyway.)

The issue of how the police respond to class is a much bigger issue (at present), which isn't getting better over time (and might be getting worse).

I can only deal with so much, so I think we should focus on the ongoing, growing problem that impacts everyone rather than the smaller, already improving problem that impacts just some people. I think the focus on "racism" in the policing is distracting from that -- it's treating the last 5% as the main 95% of the problem -- and worse, splits the two biggest demographics on a topic they really should align on.

It's not that the racist component is unimportant -- it's that it's just considerably less important than the underlying problem, so while they're right about there being racism, they're wrong about racism being the problem with the police. There'd still be a problem with the police killing blacks even if it were at the same per capita rate as whites! (And arguably, it already is under the "equal" rate, and police should kill more blacks to be "fair" or "not racist".)

> So how do you propose to magically solve their poverty if that is "the real issue"? Because from where I sit as a homeless person, that comes across as an excuse to not deal with racism, which is real and does have an impact.

I don't propose to magically solve their poverty. I expect to incrementally chip at the causes and traps while hundreds of thousands or millions suffer and die needlessly, because economic and social shift is hard. But there are economic policies we know of that can address poverty, and we are making in-roads at that problem, even if it's been hard.

My argument is that telling police who are already responding to economic and cultural incentives, not racial ones "don't shoot them because of their skin" does absolutely nothing, and worse than nothing if it discharges our emotional energy we might have used to tackle the real issues with class instead. In that way, correctly identifying the cause helps us even if we can't do anything about it directly -- at least we're still mad about it, instead of thinking it's all good when really, things will continue to deteriorate.

[Mz]

Well, I guess, I am more wondering what you, personally, are doing to "solve poverty" and that isn't merely some rhetorical device or idle curiosity. I run at least three websites intended to get useful info into the hands of the most vulnerable and needy. I am not a fan of policy advocacy and I wonder why you are putting so much time and energy into this argument. If it is a derail, why are you spending time and attention on the derail, thereby taking energy away from solutions?

And I suppose that sounds hypocritical. But I am just basically trying to get through the damn day and that's why I am talking with a stranger on the internet about a topic I tend to intentionally avoid as not a good use my time.

Peace.

[SomeStupidPoint]

> I am not a fan of policy advocacy and I wonder why you are putting so much time and energy into this argument.

Well, for starters, policy (and politics in general) is a big deal.

For instance, the city I'm in is spending about $50 per person in the metro on homelessness every year (which works out to about 1% of the budget). So not only does politicking shape how they spend my $50 yearly "contribution", it shapes how they spend everyone else's $50, which adds up pretty quickly in a major metro. It works out to about $13k per year per person currently on the streets, so programs with a 3 year duration would have about $4k per person per year to work with from the city.

That's, perhaps, not enough to just outright solve the problem -- but we're within an order of magnitude. And helping steer something within that kind of striking range of the problem is way more than I could do through other channels.

That being said, the next most important thing I do is tutor in poor areas. I charge a lot to teach privileged children math (and not to brag too much, but my students usually go on to do well in their future math classes), but offer those services at a steeply discounted or free rate for people who can't afford it. It'll only directly impact a few lives and only to a limited extent, but at some level, that's all it really takes. That if we really want to break things like cyclic poverty, we need everyone to put in a couple hours of professional effort a week/month, and sustain the adjustment for a generation or two. Again, advocacy is important -- we have to convince our peers that it's worth it to put that effort in. But that's how the world really changes, with the waxes and wanes of small, every-day social trends.

And I've been known to make the occasional spur of the moment donation or buy random meals, but I don't really count that. I mean, I'm sure it helps in small ways -- a good meal counts for a lot, and being acknowledged or treated as a person can mean as much -- but it's not really moving the ball forward on the problem. (Though, again, if everyone just did a little bit of that, it probably would make a big difference, cumulatively.)

But let me ask you this: when we live in a land and time of plenty, when we have enough food, wealth, and homes for everyone with margins left over, what makes you think homelessness is anything besides a policy and advocacy issue?

Homelessness (in the US) is an artificial outcome of our economic model, it's existence a choice we're making (as a society), and we should never forget that.

[Mz]

Thank you.

Long before I was homeless, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU. I am aware policy matters. But, I am kind of a fan of That government is best which governs least.

When I was first on the street, I went to meal sites, etc for a time. I mostly hate programs intended to "help the homeless." They mostly suck. Homeless people are just people without housing. If we get off the street, we stop being The Homeless.

If we focused more on solving things like the huge shortage of affirdable housing in this country, a lot more people like me could solve our own damn problems without having to go through some program where we will be treated like idiots who should be grateful for what is often rather abusive treatment. Let me recommend these two links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12639356

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-dece...

Thank you very much for teaching math. That is always a good thing. I tutored math for free as a member of Mu Alpha Theta (a collegevlevel math honor society) in 11th grade. A lot of math instruction really sucks. Props to you on that account.

[SomeStupidPoint]

I agree that a lot of programs for the homeless suck, and they suck for the same reason that a lot of prison programs suck, in that people often attach moral or social evaluations to the people involved -- homeless or criminals -- that just aren't true. They don't see "there goes me, except for a few lucky encounters", they see "there goes something I could never be".

Which is why I feel even more obligated to be involved on the advocacy side -- part (perhaps even all) of fixing the problem is changing the narrative in society about who the homeless are. Shaping that narrative, and the effect it has on choices about our economic model or policy decisions, really is the most direct thing I could do to combat homelessness, because it eats at the heart of what makes homelessness so damaging.

That being said, I'm also a big fan of more scientific methods. Things like "housing first" programs are showing HUGE promise in making lasting change, and while less glamorous, we're slowly tying the social safety net back together and working to make it more efficient, so less people fall through the holes (which got a lot bigger when certain people were in power and went around making tears, but c'est la vie) and become trapped in homelessness in the first place.

I have a lot of hope for involuntary homelessness being (largely) solved in another generation or two, if we can keep momentum on it. The problem of what to do with some of the people who are... less there mentally, and have trouble functioning in society at a personal level is of course difficult in the long term, because while we can give them houses easily enough, keeping them in them might require involuntary and on-going intervention at times, and that's a very touchy subject. Mental health care, particularly involuntary mental health care, has a dark history in this country.

I actually need to get going, but I've enjoyed speaking with you.