What do you think when you hear the word "homeless"? As a middle class American raised in the suburbs, I never thought much about homelessness growing up. Like probably most of you reading this article, I'm a pro at putting up blinders when I'm walking around anywhere so that it's almost like the homeless don't exist. But over the past few years my heart has been continually broken for this population of people, and I started getting involved from time to time serving dinners at shelters and talking to the people who came in. Now I can't unsee what my eyes have been open to. I am guilty, and we as a country are all guilty, of hiding behind our ignorance and judgement to avoid addressing homelessness. And apparently, this is even happening in the human brain at a basic neural level.
There was a research study conducted by Susan Fiske of Princeton, Amy Cuddy of Northwestern, and Peter Glick of Lawrence University that tested how people perceive members of different people groups. The study specifically looked at the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) of the brain, which activates in our brains when we do any activity that involves other people. Fiske and colleagues measured how activated the mPFC was when people were shown images of people of different groups, and then the researchers rated the average overall attitude of each people group based on determined competence (intelligence) and warmth (kindness). As the researchers hypothesized, when people were shown images of homeless people, the mPFC was not activated and homeless people were rated as having perceived low competence and low warmth. What all of this means is that we dehumanize homeless people even at the neural level.
Obviously, this one study cannot speak for every individual, but I do believe that it is a good representation of how our society looks at the homeless population- which accounts for over half a million people in the United States. I first found it interesting that we have built these walls up that allow us to pass by the homeless every day on the street and sleep easy every night. I wondered how we could look at someone holding up a sign asking for money and either ignore them completely or instantly assume that they had done something deserving to be in that position. But then I realized that it made sense.
What if we let ourselves open our eyes to the issue of homelessness? Suddenly we might find ourselves unable to look away. We would start to see a "homeless person" as instead a person who is homeless. We could no longer place blame on them, but rather it would place the blame on us. It would inspire compassion and require action. It would force us to examine our cultured judgement of addiction and mental illness that drives us away from helping people and instead causes us to recede inside the safe borders of our life. What if we came together to make an effort to end homelessness?
If we really let ourselves see homelessness for the massive issue it is, maybe then it wouldn't be a massive issue anymore. I don't personally know the best way to go about tackling this issue but I do know that the first step in solving anything is to acknowledge it as a problem in the first place. Then we need to educate ourselves in order to problem solve and figure out how to go about finding a solution.
I challenge you to open your eyes to the issue of homelessness in your own community. I challenge us to put aside our fear in order to come together and alongside our neighbors in need.
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
― Mother Teresa
**Disclaimer: Although employed by an organization that works with the homeless population, this article has no connection to any organization. I write using only my point of view and speak with no affiliation, nor am I qualified to do so.
