Samantha Adams
Professor Graban
ENG-W240
Critical Bibliographic Essay
Due: 25 March 2011

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones,
But Words Will Form Your Perception of Me

“People are tired of homelessness. … It’s affecting who we are and how we look—and we look terrible” (qtd. in Pascale). This quote is taken from a newspaper that quoted a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development representative. Now, who, exactly, do you think is tired of homelessness? Surely it would be most logical to assume that those individuals experiencing ‘homelessness’ are the ones who are tired of living it. Did you assume that the speaker was talking about the housed community before you knew these were the words of a HUD representative? Or did you realize that the people who should be rightfully tired of homelessness and whose self-images are affected by it are those who are actually living it, experiencing it? However, there was nothing in this newspaper’s article that suggests that the people who are tired of homelessness are those who are living without shelter (Pascale 261). The word “we” implies that the HUD representative being interviewed is speaking for a larger group or community of housed people. The speaker is establishing audience identification with the use of the word “we” and is, at the same time, placing people who cannot afford housing outside this circle of identification.
The words of this HUD representative are just one of countless demonstrations in our society of how language, whether written or spoken, places people into categories from which results in stereotypes, loss of identities, and subsequent dehumanization. Much of the language that shapes the ideas about, images of, and common inclinations toward the people commonly referred to as “the homeless” is not given a second though. Housed people read about “homeless people” in the newspaper. They hear about “homelessness” on the news. They donate to charities that provide basic resources to “the homeless.” Not once do most of these “housed people” give a second thought as to how the words they read, speak, and hear are possibly defining and dehumanizing the individuals experiencing homelessness. I, however, have second thoughts about how these forms of language not only report the news or tell a story, but how they define certain human beings and how this, in turn, shapes the attitudes toward those experiencing homelessness, which can ultimately attenuate genuine efforts to support these individuals. I want to explore all the ways that language, in its various forms, affects perceptions of people experiencing homelessness and why certain terms associated with more negative stereotypes are more commonly used than more factual and relatable terms.
First it is most important to understand how certain labels such as “the homeless” have come to be. According to Celine-Marie Pascale in There’s No Place Like Home: The Discursive Creation of Homelessness, the term “the homeless” is a fairly recent discursive formation (250). In the 1980s, “the homeless” actually referred to hardworking people who had lost their homes due to economic changes that caused them to lose their jobs. The term “the homeless” recognized the unexpected distress families were experiencing and that losing their houses was not a result of their own choices, but of economic decline. During this time, newspapers would publish articles highlighting the hardships the new “homeless” were experiencing by writing short personal stories about families such as Mrs. Culley and her children (254). Unfortunately, these insightful articles were short lived. Eventually newspapers and even high profile officials started to attribute homelessness to noneconomic causes, such as mental illness, substance abuse, and personal choice (254). Newspapers started to suggest that perhaps people’s compassion toward “the homeless” was misplaced (255). During this time, homelessness was transformed from an acute recent problem to a chronic issue.
Along with the creation of the term “the homeless,” there is a subsequent separation by applying this label: there is “the homeless” and then there is everyone else. “The homeless” or even “homeless people” implies a permanent state of being. These labels simply say that homeless people are homeless; it’s who they are. As previously described, terms such as “the homeless” have become linked with issues such as substance abuse and laziness. When these terms are constantly used by popular news sources or spread by word of mouth, their association with negative stereotypes is reinforced. Olusola Olufemi explains this in Barriers that disconnect homeless people and make them difficult to interpret: by exercising the power to name, we construct a social phenomenon, namely homelessness, the criteria used to define it, and a stereotype of the people to whom it refers (462). Perhaps it is, in fact, not those experiencing homelessness who have earned their label associated with negative connotations, but simply it is the housed community that has labeled them as such. It seems as though perhaps it is the “housed people” who have defined “homelessness” even though most of them have never even experienced such a situation nor worked directly with it. Why are the “housed” and the media defining “the homeless?” Why do they get choose a one-size-fits-all façade for a “group” of countless unique, individual people that happen to be experiencing the same misfortune? Since when does anyone mold anyone’s identity other than his or her own?
Jo Phelan et al. writes in The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label “Homeless” on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons that the poor and homeless are stigmatized, which in turn spoils their identities and disqualifies them from social acceptance (323). The labels bestowed upon people experiencing homelessness, such as “the homeless” or “homeless people,” carrying negative connotations, are destroying the identity of these associated individuals. She suggests that the label of being homeless is judged more harshly than just being poor housed because there is more inequality to be justified (325). These harsh labels not only destroy identities, they erase them. They take away the one thing that makes a human being a person: one’s identity.
This grouping and subsequent loss of identity is not simply an outsider observation. Individuals experiencing homelessness are aware of the dehumanization that is a result of being grouped into the one-word category of “homelessness.” A study done by Check K. Wen et al., Homeless People’s Perceptions of Welcomeness and Unwelcomeness in Healthcare Encounters, is an illustrating example of this. Participants—that is, people experiencing homelessness—perceived experiences of unwelcomeness in healthcare as acts of discrimination, with the perceived basis of discriminatory treatment being the fact that the participants had to admit that they were “homeless.” A constant pattern was seen where participants felt dehumanized when healthcare providers related to them in “I-It” ways, that is, the healthcare provider reduced them to an object, was unwilling to know and empathize with them, ignored or failed to listen to them, or made them feel disempowered. However, participants described welcoming experiences that were consistent with “I-You” ways of relating with the healthcare provider, that is, the healthcare provider made the participants feel valued as a person, listened to them, and made them feel empowered (1013).
So, why do we so often use “I-It” terms such as “the homeless” instead of an “I-You” term like “people experiencing homelessness”? Saying instead “people experiencing homelessness” loosens the ties between homelessness and negative stereotypes. It recognizes “the homeless” as people simply experiencing a hard time. It makes “the homeless” seem more like people to which “housed” people can relate, because, doesn’t everyone experience difficult times their in lives? But why don’t we use this term in our everyday speech and literature? Why don’t we give people experiencing homelessness the benefit of the doubt?
Denny Taylor writes in Toxic Literacies that we (referring to the housed community) do not want to know it was, say, Jerry who died. We don’t want to know it was Pauline who got a degree but still lives in poverty (7). He writes, Don’t tell us [his or] her name. Why don’t we want to know their names? Is it easier that way? Is it because saying “people experiencing homelessness” is too relatable to “housed people?” Because, perhaps, people experiencing homelessness are actually people experiencing some sort of difficulty in their lives that may not be their own fault, which in turn may make the housed community feel vulnerable? Or does the housed community give people experiencing homelessness a simple label as “the homeless,” a term of unsympathetic rejection (Olufemi 460), because a label makes it easier to feel less guilty about not doing more to help this “group?” Would housed people feel more guilty about the fact that people experiencing homelessness are suffering if they called them “people experiencing homelessness,” a term of sympathetic acceptance (Olufemi 460), which may actually attribute personal identities to these people? Is the housed community of the United States afraid of facing some sort of failed American Dream by trying to understand the plight of Americans experiencing homelessness? The answers to these questions that we must ask ourselves in order to inspire any sort of change are unclear. What is clear though is that materiality—of homelessness in this case—is culturally produced through language, writes Pascale. If there is anywhere we must start to implement a change for the better and find a permanent solution to the overwhelming issue of homelessness, we may first begin by changing our choice of words.
So back to that first quote, “People are tired of homelessness. … It’s affecting who we are and how we look—and we look terrible.” Whose look is really affecting? With all of the associated negative stereotypes and loss of identities that are tied to the objective label “the homeless,” who is it that looks terrible? Who is tired of homelessness? People experiencing homelessness are tired of homelessness.

Works Cited

Olufemi, Olusola. "Barriers That Disconnect Homeless People and Make Homelessness Difficult to Interpret." Development Southern Africa 19.4 (2002): 455-66.

Pascale, Celine-Marie. "There's No Place Like Home: The Discursive Creation of Homelessness." Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies 5.2 (2005): 250-68.

Phelan, Jo, Bruce G. Link, Robert B. Moore, and Ann Stueve. "The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label "Homeless" on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons." Social Psychology Quarterly 60.4 (1997): 323-37.

Taylor, Denny. Toxic Literacies: Exposing the Injustice of Bureaucratic Texts. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1996. Excerpts.

Wen, Chuck K., Pamela Hudak, and Stephen W. Hwang. "Homeless People's Perceptions of Welcomeness and Unwelcomeness in Healthcare Encounters." J. General Internal Medicine 22.7 (2007): 1011-017.