UC Berkeley Don’t See Me
Being homeless causes stress, yo. It fucks with your body. It fucks with your mind. It means living in a world where no family, no community, no city is willing to help you when you need them most. It’s trying to figure out how to make it to work or the service office 100% of the time when the MUNI don’t run on time 70%. It’s trying to figure out how to get some food in your stomach without a kitchen, when you can’t stand one more free cookie or bag of chips. It’s trying to figure out how to stay healthy when you can’t even stay warm or clean or get medical care. It’s trying to figure out how to get a roof over your head when minimum wage pays $1,200 a month but rent is $1,100 a month for a studio. It’s trying to figure out why even though you’re doing everything you can to survive under conditions that are straight deadly, people look at you like you’re weak. Like you’re disgusting. Like your pitiful or like you’re dangerous. Like you’re a criminal.
And why is that folks? Well, the newspapers and the movies sure do a great job of teaching folks that homelessness is a personal problem. Folks that are homeless brought it upon our lazy, dirty, crazy, unethical selves and, for whatever reason we are homeless, we probably deserve it. Further, we will never learn that we are disgusting and wrong if the privileged folks don’t teach us the error of our ways. According to them, the only way homeless folks will become housed is if society punishes us.
So mindless tools like Chuck Nevius and the Chronicle print articles about how we’re filthy animals for sleeping in the park. They can print articles about how panhandlers should be expected to get shot by the SFPD. The Chronicle can print articles about how children from communities of color should not be seen together because they are gang members. The Chronicle tells San Franciscans that homeless people are sick, dirty, and a threat. They tell their readers that poor folks need to pull up their bootstraps, and if they can’t do that, they can expect to be housed in prison.
The Chronicle hires privileged folks to write about us and tell lies about what we go through and who we are. They pretend like the way their people create cost-of-living gaps, displace communities, criminalize and discriminate against us, refuse to pay living wages, refuse medical care and social support services for veterans, seniors, the elderly, those with mental and physical health needs, racism, homophobia, sexism, and motherism all have nothing to do with the fact that 6-10,000 people in San Francisco—many of whom are families with small children and working parents—do not have a place to call home. They like to pretend like its not their fault that homelessness is a crisis in this nation, and the only way they can buy into this flagrant illusion is to spend millions in media campaigns against poor and homeless folks.
This is an old story. It’s the media’s job to spin bull for the rich folks, the corporations, and the governments that hold ‘em together. POOR Magazine has been fighting the corporate media since it was birthed out of Tiny and Mama Dee.
On March 6 and 7, Tiny and the Poor News Network (PNN) family brought their skolarship to the campus of UC Berkeley with the co-sponsorship of the East Bay Community Law Center and the Center on Culture, Immigration, and Youth Violence. After months of hard work, the 2008 Spring Symposium “Whose Poverty? Whose Crime? Unlocking the Criminalization of Poverty” rocked UC Berkeley.
It was a trip walking through that campus. It was like some kind of book-y Disneyland. The landscaping was impeccable. Fat red squirrels scampered all over the campus. Everyone there looked very well-rested. They looked like they had spent their nights in warm rooms, in comfortable beds. They looked like they took long baths and showers and used nice lotions and perfumes. They looked like people took care of them and they didn’t have to worry about much else but their books and their papers and their sororities. They looked like they had places to live and communities to call home. They looked each other directly in the eye. They looked at me a little funny.
I made my way through the fat red squirrels and the large square buildings named after people that made money in hip and exciting new fields of their day—like eugenics—to Boalt Hall School of Law. I was searching for Tiny and the PNN family. Tiny is my mentor, a mama to me and all her PNN children, and one blonde bombshell that’s got the spirits of the gods lighting her words on fire. From the looks of it, UCB needed to be lit up.
At the symposium, there were presentations from all kinds of “scholars.” One student gained prominence by doing research that led her to discover that women go into prostitution because they need money. Good thing I went to that panel, cuz when I was working in the sex industry I thought it would look good on my résumé. Another man gave a presentation about his non-profit that promoted using the police as service providers. Funny, cuz the only services I’ve seen from them is harassment, beatings, citations, and jail time. These cozy folks were confused.
But Tiny wasn’t about to let them steal the show. We had people with real experience, soldiers on hand. Paul Boden, of the Western Regional Advocacy Project skooled those folks on how homelessness became a structural crisis in the 1980s and blew up the myth that homelessness is an individual choice. Krip-Hop founder, PNN journalist, and slammin’ poet Leroy Moore called out the school’s negligence of scholars from communities living with disabilities. And of course, the welfare QUEENS brought the house down with their groundbreaking performances of their life stories as mothers of struggle.
The event can best be summarized, though, by the panel “Trash, Dirt, Mess, Crazy, Stupid!” Students, scholars, and skolars were all in attendance to hear Tiny throw down with Martin Reynolds of the Oakland Tribune and UCB’s own media expert Susan Rasky. Ms. Rasky introduced the panel, but not before she introduced her defensive posture. “It looks like I’m going to be the one on the defensive,” echoed from her microphone.
In true POOR style, Mama T opened with a poem that gripped the souls of all that dared to claim humanity in that room. She taught the room about the myth of objectivity that says corporate reporters can speak as if their opinion. She pointed out how poor folks are dehumanized and criminalized in the papers. She brought up examples of real community journalism from the PNN Family, the Street Sheet, and Street Spirit. She challenged the notions of authority and scholarship and honest reporting. She called them out on their racism and classism via descriptions of the lives of folks living in struggle.
Mr. Reynolds followed. He jumped on Tiny’s energy, wanting to help bring journalism to the standards Tiny articulated. He didn’t challenge her. He knew she was right. In the moment, false support and false promises seemed appropriate to him.
Then UCB’s media scholar stepped up to play the martyr roll. She was too weak and unlearned to challenge the truth as well, so she opted to play the martyr roll. She bellowed, “Tell me what me and my students can do.”
So Tiny did. She told Susan about bringing in real skolars to do the teaching. She talked about listening to communities of struggle and understanding that they have the solutions, just not the resources. She told Susan everything she needed to do to actually help our cause.
Susan responded by saying that she and her students already knew how to talk to folks in the community and that it is poor folks that need to catch up on state and national politics.
And there you have it folks. This is how progressive and liberal folks fight full force on the front lines to criminalize poor people. They battle with their good intent and they kill us.
I talked to Susan after the panel. I told her how inappropriate it was for her to dismiss Tiny’s request and suggest that she needs to learn more about poverty. I told her that her defensive posture when faced with dialogue with oppressed folks reflected her failure to understand how to listen to or promote the decriminalization of folks from my communities. I told her that if she thought it was appropriate to act defensively when folks from oppressed communities speak to her, and she was teaching her students that one should act defensively, then she had no right interacting with my communities. I told her that she needed to bring real skolarship into the classroom and real teachers to teach her students until she learned it herself.
Here eyes darted around looking for a colleague or friend. Her eyes said, “Do you see this crazy woman I’m being forced to talk to right now?” Susan kept repeating in her defensive tone and posture, “Well, my intentions are good.” Another man came up to us and told her that he read a story that one of her students wrote and that it disgusted him to know that her students were speaking so poorly about homeless people.
But Susan will go on with her good intentions, teaching her students to go on the defensive if people challenge the ridiculous ideas they have. She will go on to speak as a poverty expert at panels of other confused people in power, and they will take her suggestions and move forward thinking that they are working with the best intentions. She will continue making money hand over fist off of false observations that further dehumanize and criminalize people of struggle. Her good intentions keep me homeless, keep me criminalized, keep me struggling. Screw her good intentions.
And last week, when the article came running lies about Coalition on Homelessness and homeless folks, no one from UCB came to the battle. Susan did not call Chuck Nevius. The Boalt Law School did not offer lawyers to help us sue for liable. The Oakland Tribune did not put a call out to stop media hate speech and reinstate journalistic integrity. None of those folks could ruffle their collars to help defend us. But I guess they had good intentions.
Lola
