How do we challenge the scapegoating of the poor and develop clear thinking and build justice in Alabama?

How do we challenge the scapegoating of the poor and develop clear thinking and build justice in Alabama?

On a recent trip to Saint Louis, Missouri to attend the United Methodist Women’s National Assembly we stopped for lunch. At lunch Nancy and I ate with one of the gentlemen on the trip. He asked us about our ministry at Reconciler and I shared with him the work we are doing to address the needs the homeless have for justice in Birmingham. He immediately changed the subject and began to scapegoat the poor who use their food pantry at his home church, denigrating them for the perceived abuses they use to take advantage of the charity offered by his faith community. This scapegoating is not an uncommon experience for me to hear as I relate my work with the poor and marginalized in Birmingham. As I was boarding the bus for the remainder of the trip, I decided to write a response to the common practice of scapegoating the poor in Alabama. What follows is the response I wrote.

Poverty creates crime, ignorance and disease. Poverty is the fruit of injustice. Poverty happens to people, it is not something they bring on themselves. This truth needs to be communicated. Injustice is the lack of access to resources and relationships that we need for meaningful and abundant life. When injustice reigns, poverty is created and grows.

If a society is organized to deny some of its members access to resources and relationships for meaningful life; the denied, the excluded will use their creativity to survive. These necessary creative survival responses are often outside the social mores’ of the dominant society. These survival strategies are often criminalized by the dominant group and the poor and marginalized are blamed for using the only survival possibilities they have.

An inadequate and limited charity system is not a substitute for justice. When injustice exists, abuse of the charity system is a necessary skill to live. Injustice or the denial of access to resources and relationships needed for a meaningful and abundant life is the fundamental theft perpetuated by the dominate society and experienced by the poor and marginalized. They are then driven to abuse a limited and insufficient charity system to survive for which they are scapegoated.
Rather than scapegoating the poor and homeless for abusing a weak charity system, it is more important to see that the tax structure that funds education in Birmingham City Schools at $2,400.00 per student, Jefferson County School System at $5,100.00 per student, and $6,800 per student in Mountain Brook Schools is the fundamental theft of access to quality education that produces and maintains ignorance, poverty and disease for the historically marginalized.

Instead of criticizing the hungry and sick for their impatience with the charity bureaucracy, why aren’t we impatient with our city, county and state for refusing to provide the matching funds to use federal dollars to build and operate a quality regional transit system? No quality regional transit system denies access to employment, healthcare, education, shopping, and recreation to tens of thousands of people who live in poverty. This denial is an overt robbery of the poor and marginalized and of our entire economy. Many would work and provide for themselves and their family with quality regional transit. It is not clear thinking or acting to denigrate the poor for manipulating an inadequate charity system when they are denied the access that quality public transit provides.

To deny human beings access to the legitimate economy by not providing meaningful work at a living wage is serious robbery. For a man or woman to work in a structure that denies a living wage is the generator of poverty and the generator of the abuse the poor cause in an inadequate charity system.

The lack of clear thinking and justice also results in the policy of punishment and removal as a way to address long term homelessness, another form of scapegoating. The long term or chronic homeless are single unaccompanied adults with a serious disabling condition who have been homeless for more than one year or with four periods of homelessness in the last three years. Studies across America have proven that it cost less to end chronic homelessness with permanent supportive housing than it does to control the chronic homeless with punishment and removal using the police and courts. We are stealing from our whole community by not solving chronic homelessness with permanent supportive housing.

Scapegoating the poor and marginalized instead of exposing injustice and building justice for all is limiting all of us and our whole culture. The poor and marginalized are not inferior and incompetent. They are victims of injustice. The next time you hear someone or the media scapegoating the poor and marginalized let it be a red flag for you. Identify the underlying injustice and contradict the scapegoating.

Scapegoating: –noun
The act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself.

Check out these web sites for personal stories of the struggle of the homeless.

http://homelessinbirmingham.blogspot.com/
http://www.prayforthehomeless.org/
http://homelessplight.wordpress.com/

R. Lawton Higgs, Sr.
May 31, 2010