Reply #627: There's either a third group of people...

[casstheturtle]

...or there are members of the first group on different sides of the debate.

Because I am seeing people who object to this program based on personal experiences of homelessness or poverty, that allow them to see where the program could range from useless to outright destructive. As someone who is seeing things from that angle, and especially knowing the fact that people in poverty tend to have less access to academia, it seems something beyond ironic to call us academics with no care for helping real people in the real world. When we are basing our opinions solely on a combination of our own experiences as real people in the real world, and the experiences of other people we know in the real world.

I don't know if that's who you're aiming that comment at, but I hope it isn't. It's an unfortunate fact that not all things purported to help homeless people or other poor people actually do, some of them harm us, many of us have legitimate concerns or outrage about them from experience. You don't have to agree with our viewpoints, to avoid calling them merely academic, divorced from reality somehow, and to avoid insisting that we don't care about helping people like ourselves or other people we know and care about.

In general, if you read a poor or homeless person as saying that things that are actually helpful to poor and homeless people ought to be avoided, then you're almost undoubtedly reading them wrong, and should just accept at that point that there's some part of what they're saying that you're misreading, even if you don't know what. The "what" of it is mostly that we disagree as to what might be helpful and what might not. Which is very different from "castigating people for helping" and all the other phrases like that I've seen used to describe what we're really trying to say.

The doubts we have are based on real experience of being "helped", regardless of whether we turn out to be right or wrong. At some point people have to face the fact that not all charitable efforts on behalf of a group of people, help that group of people, and that the people who do help us are not always saints, they often have their own agendas and egos and power trips wrapped up in it, even if they make material sacrifices along the way. And that if that isn't examined as well, we can go on being harmed even through programs that, in theory, really would otherwise help us.

The most academic-seeming part of this discussion, from where I sit, is the one where it's demanded that people put away their real-world experience and those of our friends and neighbors as irrelevant, and rely on one particular set of statistics that we've all managed to critique in one way or another to begin with. The rest has seemed rather non-academic in general to me, on all of the different sides.