The politics of homelessness

The politics of homelessness

So as you (the possibly existent reader) probably know, I'm taking this year to travel and farm. And one of the things about traveling around is that it means I'm basically homeless. And while I usually have a roof over my head at night, it's not uncommon that I end up in a city, trekking with my life's possessions in hand or on my back while I walk or take public transportation. It happened less after I got my car but now while I'm in search of a replacement car after my car got hit by a deer (see: elegy to a buck) I find myself thinking about homelessness means again.

The first time I was asked whether I was homeless was my spring break of my sophomore year of college. I was in New York city for the whole week so I had packed up all my clothes for dancing and running and walking in central park. And I packed it all up in my backpacking backpack which is huge and blue. So here I am, taking up two seats on the subway from manhattan to brooklyn, where I was staying the night I arrived and this man in a suit looks over at me and asks ‘Are you homeless?’ and I found my first reaction was to be defensive. I was ashamed that someone had mistaken me for homeless, although it was more or less true at the time. I was couch surfing with friends and I didn't have a permanent home base. So why was it so upsetting to me that this stranger had asked, politely, whether I had a permanent place of residence?

My grandmother lives in New York city and my family and I visited her frequently from a young age. And one of the first things I learned was how to ignore the poverty. My grandmother has a large apartment on the upper west side of manhattan and can be considered, by anyone's standards, a wealthy woman. And while occasionally I saw members of my family give food or kind words to people asking, most of the time, when my family, family friends, and other New York natives to whom I was exposed simply ignored these people.

So flash forward to the present. Here I am, sitting by myself in the back of an IHOP. To my left are two bags: one filled with the clothes I need this weekend. The other bag has a water bottle, a bunch of important papers for my car, my computer, my chargers, a broken pair of earphones, and a dilapidated deck of tarot cards. Are there people looking at me? Not really, I'm all the way at the back of the restaurant. Can I ever detach myself from the classism that makes me think being homeless is shameful? Am I as liberated as I think if I still experience this extreme, subconscious bias against homelessness? How do I combat this as an individual? How do I combat the systemic classism that leads to this shame? Ultimately, I am homeless right now, although I had preferred to describe myself with words like nomad and vagabond, probably because they carry a different class connotation. So for now, I will carry homeless as a title with pride, in defiance of the classism of society.