Humans of New York

Fighting dehumanization on all fronts

Photo by Gabriel Garcia Marengo on Unsplash

I ate a lot last week, I slept a lot, I spent time with family and some great old friends. Then, I came back to New York City. I took the train, a fortunate feature of this stage of life, far superior to the long list of bus companies I took in and out of NYC in early adulthood. As the Amtrak nears the city you see the famous skyline rise above its little island, often lit up against the night. Then, suddenly, you’re whisked into a tunnel, surrounded by darkness as you go beneath the Hudson River. As the illumination slowly returns your train docks at Penn Station and the slow shuffle outwards and upwards into the city begins. But before you get where you’re going you must pass through the bowels of the terminal, and one thing is impossible to avoid; this internationally known train station in the richest city on Earth has countless homeless people seeking shelter in its maze-like halls.

As you wind through the warren beneath Penn Station, you’ll see people huddled in stairways, wandering and speaking to themselves, or unconscious atop pieces of cardboard. Cops come through, telling people with nowhere to go to move along, and they go somewhere. In my years in and out of the train station nothing has fundamentally changed. The $1.6 billion redesign that created “Moynihan Train Hall” within the station didn’t alter this reality. In fact, it was designed with zero chairs or benches in the main hall so that those with nowhere to go can’t go there.

Travelers can’t help but look at the New Yorkers taking refuge in the station – we’re a nation of rubberneckers and the homeless are outside of the ordinary. We can’t necessarily help our first reaction in that moment, but we can help our second thought, our third, and our response. There is a juncture in the few seconds our brains take to cycle through the stages of response. First comes a gut feeling of empathetic pain, but then we have to choose how we read that pain. Do we reject a feeling that is negative and unpleasant, and in rejecting it turn away from the suffering person in front of us, or do we accept that feeling pain on behalf of someone discarded by society is not only reasonable but points us in the right direction?

The choice could be easy, in a different world. But in the tunnels beneath New York, just as in cities across America and the world, people are prone to cutting off empathy when it brings discomfort or pain again and again and again — when it feels that nothing can be done to ease those feelings except going cold. We don’t live in a world where reaching the source of people’s suffering is simple. As those of us who have done mutual aid or charity with the homeless can attest to, handing out bandaids isn’t particularly easy, and getting to the root of problems is orders of magnitude harder.

Photo by Ev on Unsplash

Something dangerous happens during a lot of interactions with the homeless, unfortunately, and that’s people dehumanizing those who have nowhere to stay. I’ve heard more casual comments around New York than I’d care to count. In the midst of untold riches, adjacent to the halls of wealth and power, people are still gullible enough and eager enough to feel superior to someone, anyone, that they place those who have already been cast out into another category. It manifests as bum, crackhead, tweaker, all sorts of words that relegate people to a lesser designation. And each time we dehumanize we don’t only condemn the struggling to their fate, we also give the systems and oppressors that harm us all a free pass.

People aren’t disposable, but when we begin to concede that they might be we open a particular Pandora’s box. When we look at homelessness we need to understand that the cultivation of compassion is vital, and that dehumanization is lethal, both because human beings are invaluable and because if we become willing to discard people we also consent to discarding that which supports life. We risk unwittingly signing away safety nets, supports, the systems that care for us – the systems that are the material manifestation of people choosing to care for one another.

Right now this risk of discarding the individual attitudes, the culture, and the systems that enable those of us who struggle to live decent lives is stronger than ever. We never had the safety net that we should’ve had in the U.S., but there’s no doubt that the fascist movement is eager to dismantle that which does exist. Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy and the rest are salivating at the idea of privatizing huge swaths of government services, and simply removing others with no plan for replacement. Those they have no desire to replace with private services are those that allow people to retire, to not work if you’re disabled, and to survive if you’re out of work. This thrust is propped up ideologically by the belief that people don’t inherently deserve anything, a dangerous belief that animates the neo-fascist libertarianism we’re seeing from much of the oligarch class.

Selling that belief relies today, as it has historically, on the dehumanization of chunks of the population. Some people will simply adhere to the idea that we don’t inherently deserve anything, that we hardly deserve life and only earn what we work to get. But a larger group has accepted the equally sinister narrative that there’s enough to go around in this country, but “illegal immigrants” have taken too much and there would just be enough if we got rid of them. No one reading this subscribes to that violent, fascist, scapegoating bullshit, I’m sure, but we have work to do to ensure that both us and those in our circles don’t fall into contributing to this narrative. Because the insidious tendrils of dehumanization are everywhere right now.

I would posit that if we fall into dehumanizing the homeless, as many Democratic mayors and governors, among others, are encouraging us to do right now, it’s a short trip to treating others with the same callous disregard. Subscribing to the story that the powerless in the streets are responsible for the decay of our cities, instead of systems like neoliberalism and its beneficiaries who take our money and hide it in offshore accounts, draining our resources on a scale unimaginable to the man struggling to survive in a shelter of cardboard below the towers of Wall Street, feeds neatly into the narrative the right wants to sell. And today, many of the people living in shelters around New York are undocumented migrants shipped here by Ron DeSantis and others and treated despicably by Eric Adams. These men and too many others work every day to hurt those who are hurting, and they simultaneously sell us the idea that the pain of these vulnerable people threatens us. They do it all largely to shield those who actually, systemically profit off the degradation of society from our ire.

Photo by Galt Museum & Archives on Unsplash

I used to work for some very wealthy people, tutoring their children who didn’t need tutors. I wasn’t there because their kids needed help, but because every family in their circle had overpaid tutors sitting with their children during homework time. One family had an Upper East Side apartment, whose value I would conservatively estimate at $6 million. After a few months of working for them, I realized they owned the apartment across the hall too. It was rarely occupied, it was mostly for when the in-laws visited, for other guests, and for the kids to play sometimes. Down at street level people huddled without a place to sleep.

We’re supposed to venerate one group and look down on the other. We’re being encouraged, implicitly and explicitly, to dehumanize one group and make superheroes of the other. Yet which group turns off their empathy to make decisions that hurt thousands or millions of people? Which group gathers in board rooms to okay toxic chemicals in our food, microplastics in our bodies, or the latest deadly armament? I’m not saying the appropriate response is to dehumanize the ruling class, but to view the migrant selling food out of a cooler, the mom who crossed the border in the hope of giving her kid a better life, the man sitting on the slab of cardboard because he lost his house after retiring as your enemy, as the person depriving you of a better life, is so abundantly foolish it’s hard to wrap my head around. Know that someone is looking down on you – very literally from their 86th-floor penthouse – and laughing as they see you think that deporting or imprisoning the vulnerable will solve your problems.

I want us to know that we are, by and large, ourselves on the precipice of vulnerability. An accident, the loss of a job, a pandemic; we can easily be rendered vulnerable. A climate disaster can render us migrants and refugees in the blink of an eye. But beyond seeing ourselves in those we are told to disdain, we should see the society we hope to build take shape when we reject dehumanization. What would a world look like if we insisted on seeing everyone as just as human as ourselves? What if we insisted so thoroughly and systemically that we deliberately baked this view into our material reality? What if we insisted that society take care of the most vulnerable as if that person were our mother, our child, us? In forcefully pushing back against the scapegoating fascist thrust we can glimpse another world, one where everyone is cared for and one where empty apartments go to those in need, instead of those who hoard.

Whenever the impulse to write people off for a fleeting convenience arises, push back. Whenever the idea, the thought, the propaganda that letting someone else slip under the bus might save us from its wheels crops up, call it out. That lie will see us all crushed, and rejecting it, organizing against it, and building a powerful alternative just might save us all.