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IvyTech

The Most Overlooked Sub Culture

Jesse Goins
ENG 2KF
Lorina Smith
12/3/2015

Imagine for a moment that you find yourself one day without the ability to find a job and are
unable to pay for your home, electric or food; you find yourself living on the street and are the
subject of a body of dehumanizing ideas because of the situation you have found yourself in. In
America the homeless are an often neglected, subjugated & demonized class of citizen, being
associated with illicit acts, laziness and psychological problems when many of the homeless are
normal people who are just down on their luck or unable to cope with growing financial pressure
in their lives. When most people think of the homeless, they think of dirty, lazy or dangerous
people living on the streets who may try to rob or accost you on the street, but this is the
sensationalized depiction that many have from a lack of understanding of the homeless condition
in America, where many of those affected by it are normal citizens who have had to make
sacrifices to cope with circumstances that are beyond their control. Many of the homeless are
the hardest people working in contemporary society, often being exploited and paid below
minimum wage while being unable to acquire any other form of legitimate employment. Hate
crimes in the form of laws, citizens actions and even police accostment are commonplace
against the homeless who are often unable to defend themselves, while also being subject to the
public environment they reside in.

The image often invoked when the title, homeless is used is often a ragged looking person who
may have a drug or psychological problem, but many of the homeless are normal, sometimes
proliferate people with long standing troubles that eventually lead to their decline in the falsely
demonized fringes of society. When asked about homeless people who had been wrongfully
demonized, Joseph Tracey said, I remember having a friend who had been made newly
homeless, and he was clean shaven and dressed well but he had gotten in an argument with his
parents who had kicked him out. When he went out to get a job to try and make it on his own it

would sometimes come up that he was homeless, and on a couple of occasions he was even
asked to leave the premises of the establishment only after this fact was made apparent. He
wasnt the only one either(Tracey) . That a man who was thrown out onto the streets was being
asked to leave the establishment because of ideas about his person, only after it was made clear
he was homeless is just one example of how someone is judged solely on the fact that they are
homeless. When the researcher, Ravenhill went out onto the streets to gather information by
interviewing the homeless, they found something that astonished them: by just going out and
having a conversation with the homeless, they felt a humanizing effect to this group that was
often looked at as demonized and statistical, an often overlooked perspective the researcher
noted (Ravenhill). The fact that people respond with so many assumptions and aggressive
behaviour against someone who is homeless, and even those among the scientific community
have found themselves dehumanizing the culture shows just how wrongly portrayed the
homeless are.

Homelessness is often wrongly associated with qualities like heavy drinking, laziness or an
unwillingness to work, but this is often the exact opposite of the truth, with many of
contemporary homeless citizens being the subject of hard economic times, bad luck or
exploitation. Statistics have shown that there were over 13 million unemployed americans in
2012(Andersson). Nearly 4% of all americans being unemployed cant rationally be attributed to
laziness, as is a common presumption many of those uninformed about the realities of
homelessness who are not only hard workers, but often the hardest workers. Many of the
homeless are subject to jobs that pay well-below the minimum wage and often times have to hold
several of jobs in order to be able to eat at the end of the day. Often times the homeless have
some kind of employment, but it can be really under the table and not up to code. Theres been

several people I have known who are paid as little as $1.50 an hour for legitimate work, and only
take the work because they would go hungry otherwise (Tracey). The homeless are in the
perfect position to be exploited by those who are looking for easy and restriction free workers,
and should sought to be further protected instead of ostracized for their predicament, to reduce
the potential exploitation of their condition.

Even though the homeless are often demonized, more often than not its normal citizens and
police officers that are more likely to accost the homeless, and many places even have laws that
make their lives harder. I once knew a man who lived out of his car after he became homeless,
but the area that he called home and knew well also had laws against sleeping out of your car,
which made his living situation very problematic. What he did to compensate for this was that he
had to move his car each night to a new location along side streets in the area while most people
who lived there were at work, and then wait in his car until late at night when he could finally
sleep, and even then had to put a blanket over himself to hide himself in the event a police officer
did look in his window(Tracey). Political ideologies are not helpful either, as 2012 presidential
candidate Newt Gingrich has made apparent when expressing the sentiment to bring back the
ability for the poor children to need to be allowed to take up employment as something such as a
janitor, in order to earn a living wage, an idea that promotes an idea of making children of less
able families act as servants to those in more proliferate positions(Andersson). What about those
who are lazy though? Those who arent really all that bad off but try to get pity.

It is a newer sentiment to imagine that a man panhandling or asking for handouts on the street
might be looking to get an easy handout, and may even be lying about his condition to try and
get money he doesnt really need, but this shouldnt be a reason to withhold charity from all of

the homeless, and infact those who are often trusted to help the homeless are at times the largest
extortionists. Many of the homeless who had used the Salvation Army described it as being filled
with many of the most disingenuous people who are, only interested with lining their own
pockets, rather than to help those that the donations are intended for (Snow). The inability to
even trust the organization intended to assist them leads to many homeless being unwilling to
seek help, which only further impairs their ability to fix their position.

The homeless can be better viewed less as individuals who are lazy or trouble prone, and more as
a side effect of the times, with many of them being people who are affected by economic
troubles. The homeless are often overlooked and underrepresented, stratified and demonized by
those who are not among them, even though many of them are normal people whom you would
not notice as being any different from those you pass on the street every day. Although there are
those who would exploit charitability towards the homeless, it is more often than not the
institutions that wear the guise of charities, and many homeless are at times the subjects of an
uncaring and harsh system that paints them as devils for merely being down on their luck.