Aporophobia: Fear and Hatred of the Poor

Intensified homeless sweeps, what it's like to be feared, hated, used for content and clickbait, and constantly harassed by police.

Image of me in alleyway gathering of terrifying homeless people

Police across the country have been confiscating people’s personal belongings and destroying them. Ironic, considering their job is to protect and serve. These publicly funded raids directed towards any other group of people besides people experiencing homelessness would be considered destruction of private property, theft, and harassment. When citizens do this en masse it’s called a riot. When the police do it, they call it cleaning up the streets or doing a sweep.

These actions have never stopped happening, but they have ramped up after the July 2024 Supreme Court decision to no longer consider criminalizing “public camping,” or homelessness, as against our Constitutional 8th amendment rights that protect us from cruel and unusual punishment. Many cities immediately aggressively ramped up their “sweeps,” some beginning as soon as the day after the decision.

Police serve the rich, protect profit, and pillage the poor.

Many are glad to see these communities disbanded, never caring what happened to all of the humans who were just living in these spaces. Even though there have been multiple studies done that show that not only do these displacements not prevent homelessness, they actually make it harder for people to get off the street, while also costing more money in medical expenses.

A sweep in Georgia killed a man.

A project by ProPublica documents first hand accounts of items that have been stolen and trashed in sweeps, including prescription meds, the ashes of someone’s husband, and IDs needed to access resources.

I have seen a video someone posted walking through the Tenderloin in San Francisco that had a caption saying “this is what I have to walk past every day on my way to work. It’s traumatic,” which, the irony of claiming trauma over temporarily being near homeless people is pretty fucking rich, pun intended.

Some people will straight up tell you in their own way that they see homeless people as subhuman. It is made clear through various dog whistles and content farms. I constantly see and hear people refer to the homeless as inherently criminal, dangerous, and mentally unstable.

This is aporophobia: Fear, aversion, disgust, and hostility towards the poor.

But why is this how so many feel? Is it seeing people’s private lives put on display? Is it because we have to confront the fact we live in a world where we can suffer freely and be passed up and seen as failures, and we know we are part of that problem? Perhaps it is a subconscious fear that we can end up in the exact same position if we ever decide to stop working, or try to unionize, or become hospitalized.

Homelessness has become a convenient deterrent to the formation of labor unions, strikes, or quitting your job in order to find something better. Or missing any amount of work. The corporate class holds homelessness over our heads like a guillotine, ready to drop at the sign of any agitation or civil unrest. We get paid barely enough to survive because not only does it let the richest among us horde more wealth, it keeps us in line as we carry in our hearts the existential fear and anxiety of not being able to survive, a deep spiritual sense of fight or flight.

We must acquiesce or face exile.

A home is somewhere we should feel safe, where we can sleep without one eye always open, where it is illegal for the police to walk in through the front door at any moment. Many who mean well call people living outside “houseless,” but I think all this does is make us feel better about doing nothing. We can support the idea of helping them, but when it comes down to it, it is always not in my backyard.

People will make videos of themselves giving a homeless person food or clothes. This performative act of “helping” is made worse than nil by the inherent selfishness to use someone who has lost everything as currency for clout within the online world of personal brands. Having myself been that homeless person being recorded before, I can tell you that it felt more dehumanizing than the time someone threw a beer can at me from a moving vehicle, the time someone threw a handful of firecrackers at me, or all the times I’ve been yelled at to “get a job.”

You are on public view for almost your entire daily life. I’m sure some of you can relate to social anxiety, a relatively mild mental illness. Now imagine having that same anxiety but having to live in public. People experiencing homelessness are often seen at some of the lowest points in their lives. Have you ever had a mental breakdown? You’d be surprised how many Americans have encountered a mental crisis at some point in their lives. Now imagine going through that mental crisis in public. You become a show for people to watch. You don’t get greeted by mental health professionals or even comforted by a loved one, you get greeted with sirens and police officers with weapons. And in some cases, your lowest point will become immortalized online through video.

Having myself lived outside for a stretch of three years across the US, I dealt with police at least twice a week on average. And I’m a white guy. I experienced trauma early on that caused me to fear being homeless in affluent areas. I learned quickly that was where the people with the most hate lived. And some of them desired to channel that hate into physical violence. You can’t last long in the nice neighborhoods without the police showing up. I can’t imagine how many more times that fear would have been multiplied if I was a person of color.

When you get told you’re not allowed to be here over and over and over, eventually you begin to feel and understand the message within, the message that you hear everywhere you go: you’re not allowed to be. When you live outside, your existence itself has become criminal.

There is a lot of content out there about people who are experiencing homelessness. A lot of it is seeking understanding, well-meaning, but the shit that gets the most views are short videos made for clickbait. They turn streets where people live outside into zoos that everyone can visit through the screen on their phone. People have made a living creating this kind of dehumanizing content.

I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve been the dude shooting up on the sidewalk. I understand that is fucked up for some people to witness, although I wasn’t doing it directly in front of normies. Point being I have lived in many of these places around the country, at least for short periods of time. I often directly sought out these communities, because for a time, it was the only place I felt at home. It was where I felt normal, like I belonged. And I was always immediately accepted. But becoming part of that, I have felt what it is like to become part of the scenery of a place, seen as just part of the garbage on that street, ignored or actively avoided. I’ve had people shut me down before when I tried to ask them what time it was, or run away from me. I remember a nightmare I used to have where I would be chased by some person and they would be yelling at me, “No! I won’t give you money!” and I could never get away from them.

I’ve existed among what people would consider one of the “worst” places in different cities like Portland, among the Tenderloin in San Francisco. East Hastings in Vancouver Canada. Bum park in Burlington Vermont. In LA I found an entire community of people living outdoors two blocks away from the boardwalk and one block over where at night the streets were filled with people in their 20’s in cocktail dresses and tuxedos and suits going to cocktail lounges scattered in between the juice bars. I understood then what it meant to live in a dystopia, in a world that is so divided by wealth, where people one block over were out having a wonderful night out and one street over was lined with tents. I found my place among the tents.

This is why I become so angry when I see people online demonizing people experiencing homelessness. Because some of my best times out there were spent within those makeshift communities, where real fucking life was happening, where people were engaging with each other, not all avoiding each other in an attempt to get somewhere else as fast as possible. I was never robbed by homeless people, but I was by others.

The people that I feared weren’t those living on the street, they were the ones screaming at me from their vehicles, the people who looked at me with disgust. They were the detached people who lived isolated in their suburbs far away from real life. Those who seethed and hated and feared us.

They were the man in the pick-up truck who swerved to hit me as I stood with my thumb out trying to hitch south from Eugene OR. The “regular” guy who picked me up and gave me a ride and then asked if he could touch my muscles. The man who found me on the outskirts of town at night where no one else was around and groped me.

I think we often forget that we are more than just observers in this world of ours. I know I have. We are participants, and whether we like it or not, our choices ripple out from us and have effects felt throughout time in our world that we might never really be able to grasp the magnitude of. The idea that if you go back in time and change one tiny thing, it could shift the entire path of history, but why don’t we think about this in the context of the present, or what we can do right now to shift that path.

Our compulsion online to critique the existence of others rarely does much but get our hearts pumping faster in the battle to dominate and win at this contest of who is right and who is wrong. It's easy to sit at home behind a screen and pick apart other people's opinions, but actually building community takes time, care, and effort. It requires love instead of hate.

In the places we gather online, criticism is not the same thing as community.

I think especially these next four years we need to build what we want to see in the real world rather than falling for the same trap of criticism and the content farms built around such clickbait.

The main thing I want people to understand with all of this, with the interviews I do, with my own explanations of why I took the “choice” to be homeless over being a worker, is to make people understand that not only are people who are experiencing homelessness a marginalized community that needs our protection and advocacy, they are some of the most beautiful people I have ever met.

We need to stop falling for the trap of descending further into our own echo chambers but instead totally disengage from media that is created to harm us, to steal our time and our mental health, and we need to decide how we are going to build, reinforce, and protect the communities in this country. This starts with forcing a stop to homeless sweeps around the country and demanding community, stability, and most of all, housing for the families and individuals who want to get off the street.

I’m making an effort to collect as many stories as I can about homeless sweeps around the country, so if you see it happening locally, especially in smaller communities that have little or no local news agency, let me know and I’ll add it to the list. I’m working on a podcast episode about these sweeps where I hope to interview people working within these communities and journalists (specifically one I hope) who has been covering this topic for decades.

You know that old poem about Nazi Germany: first they came for the Communists, but I did not speak up because I was not a Communist, then they came for the Socialists and so on and nobody was left when they came for me? Well, they’re coming for our homeless communities. Our neighbors. Eventually there are no longer warning signs of fascism, there is just fascism. Government, police, and municipalities are inflicting chronic displacement and further criminalizing their existence. And it’s time to speak up.