I really appreciated the definition of exploitation provided here, because I realized that I’ve often heard and used the word without having a clear, concrete definition for it. The idea that transferring of the results of labor from one social group to the benefit of another is exploitation is a concept that I think is really powerful. Homeless people might not seem to be victim to exploitation, but only to someone who believes in the stereotype that homeless people don’t work. The Urban Institute says that about 45 percent of homeless adults have worked in the past month, which makes them some of the clearest possible victims of exploitation. If they are being hired, that means that someone is profiting from their work somehow, but they aren’t getting even the most basic benefits from this work–a stable place to live–so they are clearly being exploited.
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?