Who Owns Homelessness?

Keith pulled his chair up to the table, squeezing between Robert, the college professor, and Frank, the career activist. Overhead lights nearly filled the room, making the shaded crevices all the more obvious. Flip charts with animated markings looked on from three angles. Keith leaned his head in to speak.

“I would like to ask this question to everyone in this group. Your answer is very important to me. Why does the subject of homelessness mean anything to you? Please note that I used the word ‘anything’ purposefully. I already know it means 'something' to you. But ‘anything’?”

Robert, Frank, and the others at the table looked at each other, then down at their legal pads. Robert, the professor, spoke first.

“Semantics aside, I think that is a reasonable question to ask, and it does call for some soul searching, by the insistent nature of the query. Surely there are as many answers as there are people. With all due respect, I'd like to ask you to first elaborate a little on why the answer is very important to you. Or from the academic perch, what is your thesis question?”

Keith recoiled in his chair, as if struck by a bolt. He looked to the others around the table; he saw their eyes, cold, looking downward in his direction. They hoped he could rise to the challenge.

“First of all, I do not have an academic perch or a thesis question, nor do I want any. It’s important to me because if someone decides that homelessness and poverty are ‘something,’ then they are no longer open to it being ‘anything.’ The assumptions people make about homelessness, poverty, and the poor are obviously all wrong. Let’s start there, please. Otherwise, all the attention, money, and other resources put into ending poverty would have solved it by now. If anything, it’s getting worse. The focus of this group is changing mental beliefs about poverty. Thinking you know something about something you have not experienced is a nonstarter. You can’t do it. And when you do consult people who have experienced it, you don’t take them seriously in regard to applying solutions. We become token props for your wild theories. The only thing I miss about shelter life is that people did not talk surely about things they didn’t know.”

The fidgeting at the table became audible. Someone got up for coffee. Robert squinted and looked up to the side.

“If someone decides that homelessness and poverty are something they are no longer open to it being anything,” he said, repeating Keith’s words back to him. “I'm afraid that's a little too cryptic to make sense of.”

Of course this conversation did not happen in a meeting room, around a table, under lights. It took place over email, which is where people – even activists – talk like this. From there, the conversation descended into personal attacks: “That’s so White of you, bro,” and “That’s so racist of you, bro.” The silent majority pleaded for decency, or circled the wagons around those who endured an attack: “I find the remark directed to you hurtful and inappropriate. I am sorry and I stand with you.” Someone asked to leave the group entirely; someone else cut and pasted an excerpt of their work on the topic. Robert passed judgment: “In spite of my willingness to cut him slack in light of his life experiences, I find Keith’s general attitude to be far too confrontational, bitter, and arrogant to serve any constructive purpose.”

Keith was homeless until recently, and while his emails had typos and spelling errors not shown here, he asked a good question, reminiscent of J. Krishnamurti, that long-heralded teacher of the twentieth century who said, “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” The first frontal assault in the exchange, in my opinion, came from Robert; I mean, who says things like “insistent nature of the query” and “from the academic perch” in conversation?

Activist groups harp on bringing people with “lived experience” into the conversation, and asking them for solutions. This has become the gold standard of social change methodology today. It is certainly an improvement over recent years, when people with “lived experience” were draped as ornamentation across the daises of national and international conferences.

My friend Ana, who came to the U.S. as a refugee child and has subsequently spent her career in refugee services, was trotted out at a meeting of a large non-governmental organization working with refugees. She shared her “lived experience” in about ten minutes to kick off the session. The planners included a few minutes more for questions. None were asked.

Bringing people with “lived experience” to the table, letting them stay at the conference, or even asking them questions would be a step in the right direction. And yet, the email exchange captured above exposes some of the challenges of turning that aspiration into reality.

First, if you form a group to address a social issue that is rife with strong emotion, even trauma, and you want to bring people with “lived experience” of that issue to the table, then how much must you relax the norms of decent, detached dialogue that might otherwise prevail at conferences and working group meetings of educated, middle-class activists? How do you make trade-offs between inclusion and propriety? What do you do if the trauma you seek to mitigate shows up uninvited at your meeting?

In the email exchange, Frank offered the following value statements, which had never been formally adopted but that he assumed everyone could accept: “1. It is important to identify, name, and check power dynamics within our group. In other words, everybody's voice is equally valuable; 2. We must treat each other with mutual respect and reciprocity; 3. We need to recognize that each of us is different and comes from a different place, just as people experiencing homelessness (PEH) constitute a very heterogeneous mix of people; both we and PEH are not all alike; 4. We must always be aware of lived experiences and their value, including the existence of real trauma in those lives; and 5. We want very much to move forward with an anti-racism lens.” (Notably, no one in the group identified, named, or checked the power associated with Robert’s “academic perch.”)

After those values, Frank threw down the gauntlet.

“Keith,” he wrote, “I know you have very strong convictions, based on your own life experiences. These can be a valuable part of our group dialogue. However, we really need to abide by our values. If you find yourself unable to do so, perhaps this group is not the right conversation for you to be in.” So there it is.

Second, whose “lived experience” of the issue counts? In workshops about my book, Reframing Poverty: New Thinking and Feeling About Humanity’s Greatest Challenge, I start participants off with a quick warm-up discussion in small groups around the question, “Who was the first person in your family line to escape poverty, and how?” What they invariably find is that virtually everyone in the group can answer the question. Even the most privileged White man, wearing cufflinks and a Tissot watch, can speak of Ma and Pa in the Dust Bowl, and may mention an unemployed son who still lives at home. The polished Latina executive can talk about how Papi arrived in California in the Fifties to follow the harvest, or about her sister who never finished high school. There is no dichotomy between those with and without “lived experience.”

In the email exchange, Gerard, a management consultant, shared his own experience with homelessness: “My brother died homeless and I come to this with the pain of trying to help him wrestle with his demons for nearly fifteen years.” Robert shared that he too had someone close to him experience homelessness, before dying of cancer. Keith might be wise to consider whether or not he can see the person experiencing homelessness not just as ‘someone,’ but as ‘anyone.’

I have no how-to guide to offer – how to include trauma survivors in discussions that may evoke their trauma, or how to crack open that trauma to make room for the trauma of others. This is hard work.

But at the very least, speak normally. Use words that everyone understands. I’ve been working on my writing recently, and the consensus of experts seems to be that simpler is better, that monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words say more than Latinate terms ending in “-ation,” and that the closer your writing is to a fourth-grade reading level, the more the reviewers will rave about it. So don’t talk from an “academic perch,” don’t push for “thesis questions,” and never begin with, “Semantics aside…”

We’re all just people in this. We are wonderful, traumatized, desperate, and hopeful people. We are capable of doing something special together. Anything. Or nothing.