The Power of Language

In our work helping children and youth who experience homelessness to access school, we often lapse into the "homeless child" and "homeless youth" lingo. I think many of us do it because in an instant we get a picture --not a bad picture, a sympathetic picture of these kids. But it is nevertheless true that it's not such a good way to go about things. Not everyone conjures up a sympathetic picture of "the homeless" as John and Michael eloquently argue. And language use really does matter. Research has shown that language colors perception and shapes understanding. I am old enough to remember the struggles of the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s when we insisted that the words "he" and "him" did not genuinely include women but, instead, reinforced subtly the idea that men were the movers and shakers and women were subordinate. We were right. So, too, deeming a student a "homeless child" is not the best we can do. If we're a little more careful such as using "children experiencing homelessness" we challenge the listener to recognize that homelessness is not an immutable characteristic of a particular (perhaps stereotyped) child but a societal condition. Societal conditions we can change and we must!

What does your mind "see"...

when you encounter someone living on the streets?

I was shocked to learn this but it helpful to understand how ingrained our prejudices are when it comes to sizing up other people. A neurological study conducted at Princeton last year and published in Psychological Science demonstrated that when the test subjects were presented with images of homeless people or drug addicts their brain reacted with the same activity that it did when shown images "designed to provoke disgust like an overflowing toilet."

A co-author of the study had this to say of the findings:
"It's shocking," she said. "The disgust reaction and the lowered medial pre-frontal cortex reaction is really getting close to saying, 'This isn't a person whose mental state we have to think about. This is barely even a person.'"

Some of us overcompensate for these sublimated reactions with extra compassion and concern. But what about others? Might they tend to react in a hostile manner towards someone they have stereotyped as being "sub-human"?

You can find a brief article on the study at Seed Magazine here:
http://seedmagazine.com/news/2006/07/what_you_think_but_dont_say.php

People with problems are not problem people

Homeless people do not exist--there are only people without homes.

When we say that a human being is a homeless person as opposed to a person without a home, we are suggesting that he or she is a problem person as opposed to a person with a problem.

Perhaps this distinction seems like a trivial or even meaningless play on words. However, the difference between the two phrases is critical because it points to two fundamentally opposing ways of understanding people.

Let me explain what’s at stake in this distinction through an example. I used to be a teacher. At the beginning of every school year, all my fellow teachers and I would informally compare student lists to see if we had any trouble makers in our sections, so we would be ready for them when classes began. This meant that oftentimes our first introduction to some of our students was through the label of being a problem.

We were therefore not surprised when bad kids caused problems. Indeed, we expected it. If bad kids weren’t causing problems, we also knew that it was only a matter of time before they did. After all, causing problems is what bad kids do. There was no need to think beyond that simple truism.

Of course, good kids can also cause problems, but when this happened we would either ignore it, or, if the behavior persisted or was particularly alarming, try to find out what was wrong with them. Without thinking, we knew that while good kids may sometimes have problems, they are never themselves problems. Something wrong must happen to make a good kid act in a bad way. As teachers, it was our job to understand and fix good kids’ problems, so they could go on to achieve great things, just as it was our job to contain and manage the bad kids as best we could, so they wouldn’t be too disruptive in our classes.

Why did I and my fellow teachers annually segregate our students into good kids and bad kids? It wasn’t that we wanted to treat our students unfairly, though in many cases this is exactly what happened. Ultimately, I don’t think we ever thought about why we were doing what we were doing. If we had, maybe we would have realized how dividing kids up into good and bad camps runs counter to the most fundamental goal of teaching: that through an education, people can change their lives. But the power of labels lie in the unthoughtful ease in which they can reduce complex situations into their most simplistic surfaces. To say that a kid was bad was a way out of asking questions we did not want to face. For in truth, there are no good or bad kids--there are only kids, some of whom require more love and attention than we were willing to give them.

So it is with the label of homeless people. To say that someone is homeless leads many people in our society to make an unthoughtful judgment which has the effect of placing a person without a home into a virtual prison. For homeless people is more than a label--it is a judgement that stops many from asking troubling questions about why people are without homes in our society, what causes homelessness, and what our society can do to ensure that people have homes.

What am I proposing here? I’m not suggesting that if we abolished the label “homeless people" from our language, then we would automatically mobilize society into fighting the causes of homelessness. The reason that the label “homeless people” exercises the power that it does is because it grows out of a pervasive and well-entrenched system of cultural, economic, and political power, which words alone cannot significantly alter.

What I am arguing, however, is that changing our language and, more importantly, educating others why homeless people do not exist is one way that we can make some pause before they mentally consign people without homes into the prison of being a problem. Perhaps it’s the former teacher in me, but I believe that such an education can change people’s lives. It might even lead some to join the fight against the causes of homelessness, as they recognize that housing is the right of all human beings.