CONTEXT:
This video was produced by the New York City Rescue Mission, a non-profit organization that focuses on providing services (religious guidance, clothing, food, shelter, recovery programs) for homeless men and women in New York City. Their new campaign is titled "Make Them Visible;" its mission is to bring to light the issue of homelessness in the city. To start this campaign, NYCRM made a video in which non-homeless people walked by their relatives dressed as homeless people on the streets of New York. The people highlighted in the video failed to recognize their own family members and walked by them without a second glance. The video ends with the unsuspecting individuals realizing the point of the experiment: "you know, things are a lot more real than you expect," says one tearful woman about her apparent ignorance for her relative dressed up as a homeless person.
Course REading:
Black and poor are often conflated within cultural understandings of race (Lawson, 1992), so that all African American-- male and female-- are presumed within the popular (White) imagination to be poor unless qualified in a way that indicates middle or upper class. The classification of African Americans as college students is just such a qualification, moving them out of the presumed category of poor into that of the middle class (Meyers, African American Women and Violence: Gender, Race, and Class in the News, 112).
Analysis:
Although Meyers discusses African Americans being seen and understood as middle or upper class only when they enter an appropriate institutional space (the higher education system), this passage relates well to the video. As Meyers argues, the “popular (White) imagination” automatically sees African American individuals as a part of the lower class, and it is only within a certain space that a higher class standing can be associated with them without any dissonance in the White imagination. It is in this space, then, that White people can understand and accept African Americans. The video functions in a similar fashion—only when middle or upper class people saw their family members as part of the extreme lower class were they able to connect to and understand the homeless. When these people were pushed out of their domestic space and into the streets, a true comprehension about the growing problem of homelessness could be attained. The video unknowingly implies that it is not enough to simply ask homeless people about their troubles and how to help them—it takes a middle class perspective and personal connection to empathize and begin to act.
The rich/poor binary functions like other binaries that have been explored in this project: one side is favored (rich) and the other is marginalized and oppressed (poor). However, unlike previously articulated binaries, the middle of this dualism is not erased or further burdened. The middle class is, however, as equally unrepresented in various forms of discourse; most news and scholarly articles, or video projects like this example, focus on either the rich or the poor and their place in society. Despite this lack of representation, the middle class is still seen as "normal" and "common," a trait that the other middle of binaries lack. For this reason it is essential to discuss the role that middle class individuals play in this video: the “social experiment” gives them power through being able to look through the eyes of a homeless person and just as easily remove themselves from the situation. The middle class perspective is essential to the organization’s mission, which supplies the middle class with more power and responsibility, something not normally seen when examining what lies between the binary.
The rich/poor binary functions like other binaries that have been explored in this project: one side is favored (rich) and the other is marginalized and oppressed (poor). However, unlike previously articulated binaries, the middle of this dualism is not erased or further burdened. The middle class is, however, as equally unrepresented in various forms of discourse; most news and scholarly articles, or video projects like this example, focus on either the rich or the poor and their place in society. Despite this lack of representation, the middle class is still seen as "normal" and "common," a trait that the other middle of binaries lack. For this reason it is essential to discuss the role that middle class individuals play in this video: the “social experiment” gives them power through being able to look through the eyes of a homeless person and just as easily remove themselves from the situation. The middle class perspective is essential to the organization’s mission, which supplies the middle class with more power and responsibility, something not normally seen when examining what lies between the binary.