"Among the homeless, there is a bizarre egalitarianism when it comes to race, because there are so many other factors that bind them together than mere skin color or ethnicity."
Extremely well said. I've been thinking a lot about homeless people lately strangely enough. This is an angle which I hadn't really thought about, but yeah, it makes perfect sense. The stupid things we bicker about can only be seen as priorities when we have too few meaningful things to wrorry about.
Of course, the irony is that we *do* have menaingful things to worry about. We're just too easily distracted.
I live three houses from a park with a one-mile street underpass for a creek, a half mile from a methadone clinic, highway entry/exit ramps, 7-11 and QuikTrip convenience stores. These are all magnets for the homeless. I walk past everchanging encampments on my morning walks.
Some (a small minority of the homeless population) are mentally disabled. People financially destroyed by government policies, also a minority of the homeless population. The majority have the blues (fentanyl addiction) resulting in burglaries, strong arm robberies and increased shoplifting.
Due to local temperature extremes, while heat related deaths and violence are significant, drug overdose is the major cause of death. The racial/ethnic demographic is in line with population demographics, but Hispanic homeless is an exception (less) and Asian homeless are essentially nonexistent. I see mostly "white" homeless people. I suspect that it could be a case of more tough love where people won't put up with that shit and kick their ass out. I've seen several cases of that.
Jobs are gone, malls and strip malls unoccupied, factories offshore leading to the economic destruction (I'll not rant on who is responsible) but at least in my locale, drug addiction is a major cause. Maybe not everywhere. If you write about it, you will undoubtedly do a bunch or research.
America's system is the laws. It's not 1950, there is nothing a white person can legally do that is unlawful for a black person to do. It could be argued the racism is ubiquitous but if that racism results in harm it is a matter of people violating the system rather than being supported by it.
"Among the homeless, there is a bizarre egalitarianism when it comes to race, because there are so many other factors that bind them together than mere skin color or ethnicity."
Extremely well said. I've been thinking a lot about homeless people lately strangely enough. This is an angle which I hadn't really thought about, but yeah, it makes perfect sense. The stupid things we bicker about can only be seen as priorities when we have too few meaningful things to wrorry about.
Of course, the irony is that we *do* have menaingful things to worry about. We're just too easily distracted.
I live three houses from a park with a one-mile street underpass for a creek, a half mile from a methadone clinic, highway entry/exit ramps, 7-11 and QuikTrip convenience stores. These are all magnets for the homeless. I walk past everchanging encampments on my morning walks.
Some (a small minority of the homeless population) are mentally disabled. People financially destroyed by government policies, also a minority of the homeless population. The majority have the blues (fentanyl addiction) resulting in burglaries, strong arm robberies and increased shoplifting.
Due to local temperature extremes, while heat related deaths and violence are significant, drug overdose is the major cause of death. The racial/ethnic demographic is in line with population demographics, but Hispanic homeless is an exception (less) and Asian homeless are essentially nonexistent. I see mostly "white" homeless people. I suspect that it could be a case of more tough love where people won't put up with that shit and kick their ass out. I've seen several cases of that.
Jobs are gone, malls and strip malls unoccupied, factories offshore leading to the economic destruction (I'll not rant on who is responsible) but at least in my locale, drug addiction is a major cause. Maybe not everywhere. If you write about it, you will undoubtedly do a bunch or research.
America's system is the laws. It's not 1950, there is nothing a white person can legally do that is unlawful for a black person to do. It could be argued the racism is ubiquitous but if that racism results in harm it is a matter of people violating the system rather than being supported by it.