All posts by Rowan

Homelessness in Society

Learning about the ways in which society ignores and shuffles the homeless population has made me think a lot about how homeless people are made into an underclass. The movie we watched last Wednesday, Taylor’s Campaign, detailed very well the ways in which homeless people are disenfranchised, dehumanized, and pressured by political institutions. What struck me about the movie was the idea of a man running explicitly as an advocate for the homeless, and how there are simply no spaces for the voice of homelessness in the political sphere. Taylor’s Campaign is an effective depiction of how capitalism and American society targets homeless people and makes them subhuman. The truth is that large and powerful forces are invested in sweeping homeless people under the rug, so to speak. Policemen routinely mistreat homeless people, city governments renege on promises, and political forces slowly attack the livelihoods of homeless people. This seems to be by design. Homeless people have no economic means by which they can petition the government, and I would imagine very few homeless people vote. Additionally, society is individualistic and people have little empathy for the plight of others. Towards the end of the movie a series of people spoke about how homeless people are responsible for their own problems, how they don’t belong in public spaces, how they ruin the view. One man even said that homeless people should starve. People don’t want to be bothered by the sight of homelessness but they don’t want to deal with the root causes or subsequent issues that persist because of homelessness. People hold an image of what America should look like, and homeless people are not involved in that. Such sentiments are reflected in public policy that specifically targets the resources of homeless people.

The Folly Saviorism

I’ve been thinking about saviorism and its significance in this course and the work we will be doing in our volunteer organizations. In our work we will no doubt meet “saviors,” people who are fetishizing altruism. Often, the underlying current of the savior complex is the presumption that one is saving people from themselves. It is a statement of power, of privilege, and in service work many people validate their privilege through emotional experience. When one “helps” others, when one claims to provide empowerment, one effectively disempowers. More to the point, when people fail to acknowledge the inherent power dynamics in service work, those who benefit from NGO work are no longer framed as being able to help themselves. Framing may be the most important aspect of this discussion. Community activism is a good thing. These organizations are providing needed service to an unsupported and marginalized population. But just because people are doing good work does not mean that they have not succumbed to a savior complex. The world does not exist to simply satisfy the sentiment of people in positions of power. The problems of the world cannot be solved simply with enthusiasm. But in saviorism the homeless population becomes a subject, an emotional outlet, an object that exercises guilt and a states social position. When people frame themselves as a “savior” they enter into a process of objectification. The problem of homelessness exists because of a system, a system to which we are all to an extent complicit in, and because saviorism is framed a benevolent and well intentioned we don’t critically challenge the ways in which the function of saviorism in perpetuating systems of oppression.