Iris Marion Young, in her article “Five Faces of Oppression” came up with a list of criteria for defining if a group is oppressed, meaning that they experience structural injustices in our society. Throughout the article she frequently applied her terms to women and racial minorities, and I was interested to see how they would work applied to the homeless people who are the focus of my group’s project.

As for the other 55%of homeless people who haven’t worked in the past month, they face the second type of oppression- marginalization. Young says that these people who the system of labor will not use are “expelled from useful participation in social life.” I thought the feminist analysis of that idea was so interesting that I’ll return to it later, but to first take the concept at face value, it is obviously true that homeless people, because of their lack of economic power, are systematically excluded from many kinds of social participation. The example of this that I thought of was the ability to hear their concerns addressed and taken seriously in the mainstream political discourse. In many issues in politics, both sides are at least treated as if their concerns are real and they have the legitimate right to their opinion. In contrast, in housing policy politicians hardly even mention the concerns of the homeless, and their voices aren’t generally heard, as is pointed out by Picture the Homeless’s motto “don’t talk about us, talk with us!” (Two other groups stuck out to me as being similar; the way that the voices of the disabled are often left out of disability policy (and their similar motto, “nothing about us without us”) and the way that the opinions of prisoners would never be seriously considered in designing prison policy, which is an interesting way of looking at what groups we see as being ‘other.’)
Powerlessness is also experienced by the homeless, and the limitations to free expression imposed by it–always working to execute the plans of others, lacking status in the world and autonomy at work–are clearly faced by homeless people with and without jobs, given that their jobs are often minimum wage jobs.
Cultural imperialism against the homeless is interesting, because I think it matches us very closely with what we’ve talked about in class as the “culture of poverty.” Cultural imperialism says that white middle class culture is normal, and others are “stereotyped as deviant,” so of course it looks like poor people are poor because of their culture, because we just defined their culture as inferior.
Systematic violence is also clearly experienced by the homeless, most obviously and extremely in the form of brutal policing tactics that criminalize things like loitering. Young also defines it more broadly as degradation and humiliating treatment, which is also clearly experienced by the homeless, and linked to their powerlessness.
Ultimately, an idea that stood out to me throughout this article was the way that so many of these forms of oppression link people’s economic value in a capitalist system to their inherent value, and their treatment by others. In the section on marginalization, when Young said that people who aren’t part of the labor force are excluded from “useful participation” in communities, at first I thought she was stating a fact, these people aren’t able to contribute to society in useful ways. The view that ‘useful contribution’ is any contribution that is rewarded by our economic system is something that’s often taken for granted, but in reality it ignores care-taking and any other activity that’s under-valued by the market, as well as our inharent value to each other just because of our basic humanity. The fact that the homeless often are excluded from useful participation isn’t a necessary result of their lack of economic power, it’s a result of the way our capitalist system works and who it prioritizes.

Discussion Question: What kind of policies or economic systems might result in a society that more fairly values the non-economic contributions and value of oppressed people?