Homeless People Really Exist

From a series of research projects, led by Dr. Lasana T. Harris, a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and Dr. Susan T. Fiske, a professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton., it was determined that prestige-university students did not recognize homeless people and addicts as being humans.  The evidence of this came from activity in select areas of the students’ brains that did or did not occur. The students registered disgust [as determined by brain activity] when pictures of homeless people or addicts where flashed on a screen in front of them.  The verbiage used to describe what registered in the students’ minds was that homeless people and addicts were “dehumanized.”

The research by Harris & Fiske consisted of still photos flashed very briefly in front of each student, while a magnetic resonance imaging device focused on select areas of the students' brains. Whereas the students' brain activity showed that they interpreted other categories of people as being human, homeless people and addicts were interpreted to be some sort of "thing." Whatever the pictures displayed of all the people flashed before the students, it would seem to me the figures in the photo simply had to be recognizable people: HUMANS. They weren’t cats or dogs or apple trees or stacks of hay or thumbtacks or racecars. They were human beings, something that we are prone to recognize extremely easily.

It has been a curious thing to me that it could be possible for people to not recognize homeless people and addicts as being human. After all, they look human: they have arms and legs and a head and a torso like humans. They talk; they walk; and move around and act like humans. They are, to my mind, as easy to identify as human as any other category of people. So, “What the hell is going on here?” I have to wonder.

In an article in the Duke University student newspaper in 2011, "A Brain's Failure to Appreciate Others May Permit Human Atrocities," Harris and Fiske explain the circumstance of people who dehumanize others: 

“...a person can become callous enough to commit human atrocities because of a failure in the part of the brain that's critical for social interaction. … this function may disengage when people encounter others they consider disgusting, thus "dehumanizing" their victims by failing to acknowledge they have thoughts and feelings.

“This shortcoming also may help explain how propaganda depicting Tutsi in Rwanda as cockroaches and Hitler's classification of Jews in Nazi Germany as vermin contributed to torture and genocide.

"When we encounter a person, we usually infer something about their minds. Sometimes, we fail to do this, opening up the possibility that we do not perceive the person as fully human," said lead author Dr. Lasana Harris.

"We need to think about other people's experience," Dr. Susan Fiske said. "It's what makes them fully human to us."

It can be that a stereotypical sense of homeless people – dirty, bums, no-good -- is what a great many in the general population carry around in their heads that distances them from empathizing with their homeless brothers and sisters.

As a homeless person, myself, for three-and-a-half years -- until 2013, thereabouts -- and blogger of the Sacramento Homeless blog, perhaps my sense of homeless folk can be helpful at bringing, as I can, into vivid relief who homeless people are.

First off, a certain and easily-said absolute fact: No two homeless people are the same. Each has his/her own unique take on the world and sense of what is right. I’m not meaning to say that homeless people are stubborn – though some are – or argumentative, though some are that, too. What each homeless person is is just fully his- or her-self – not unlike unique members of any other category of human being.

I think of many of my homeless friends as having been “discarded” and others as being “runaways” in explanation of how they landed in the condition of homelessness. Most lost the experience of “a life more ordinary” when they broke up with a spouse or lost a job or when the “housed” life that they had became unbearable, or simply impossible.

If it is your first experience of being homeless, landing in Homeless World can be greatly disorienting. The routines that you had maintained in your prior life vanish. All the stuff – those many things -- that you had are lost to you, or will be when you can no longer pay the storage bill. It is as if that old, reliable foundation that you built up over many years has crumbled away.

The charities in Homeless World impose a feel of being institutionalized. You/’re not trapped in a building, so much, as being greatly dependent on the food and shelter and counseling that charities make available. In a sense, you institutionalize yourself if you want the safety of ready access to food and shelter.

Many homeless people make do by “living on the streets.” Since shelter space is limited, it is good that many get by as well as they do living by the river or in secluded spaces. Homeless people that find cigarettes, drink and/or drugs desirable, will maintain a street-life to get these comforts. Many others get dogs as dear outdoors companions.

The homeless are just, merely people. You would be surprised, Dear Reader, how quickly -- should circumstances intrude -- you could get swallowed up in a homeless life and there soon acquire dozen new loving, laughing friends.

But in Homeless World, too, there are psychopaths and other dangers. Many homeless men are violent. Women are often greatly mistreated in relationships they get into with homeless men.

But, it is also true that there are people who are spectacularly excellent in the homeless mix, as well. There are men that I know who are wise, compassionate, fully-adult human beings whom you can totally trust. Louis, Ron, Mike, and many others, it is an honor for me to know you.