the_dunk_tank

I hate disadvantage tourism, I hate disadvantage tourism, I hate disadvantage tourism

Remember when that millionaire businessman attempted a homelessness to $1m in a year challenge recently, which he bailed on?

His self-imposed rules seemed pretty reasonable and developing an auto-immune disease in very short order is pretty illustrative of how stressful it is to be living on the streets but the thing about it is that he hit the streets from a position of immense privilege and it wasn't just that when things got too hard for him he was able to end his larp.

Most people don't bound out the door one day to sleep on the streets feeling happy, healthy, and in a good state of mind. Most often the people who end up homeless have been stuck in completely untenable conditions, often for a very long time, where they've had to neglect their basic needs and perhaps they've been working two or more jobs trying to survive or they've been stuck trying to escape horrible and traumatic relationships. Or they've been battling addiction or they have a major health crisis that they cannot afford. Very often it's a combination of these sorts of things.

So when a person ends up on the street for the first time usually it's very traumatic and they are almost invariably completely burnt out by living under the most wretched of conditions which make sleeping rough a more viable option for survival by comparison. This makes it extremely difficult to "just take a risk" and rely on others or to spend your daylight hours on that grindset flipping furniture you find on Craigslist for free as you build up a new business empire and shit like that.

Same deal applies to Capitan Blackface over here - black people don't get to live a life free from racialised oppression and the intergenerational consequences of immense trauma, abuse, and disruption of community (as well as economic exclusion) until they are well into adulthood and they want to write a book about their experience of racism in America. Instead they get born into these conditions and they exist under them even before birth, where these factors influence development during gestation.

I have no sympathy for a person who larps as a black person and is writing a book about how people started treating him differently and how some people said mean things or threatened him and that it was harder to find a job because that's just liberal individualistic bullshit and I'd put money on the conclusion being "We don't realise how bad it really is" (the Royal We very much intended here) while missing the point that "we" don't realise it because "we" aren't listening—and have not been listening to people of colour for longer than countries like the US has existed—and how if we all just treated people with more compassion then that would solve racism because the material conditions that BIPoC face don't actually matter, just you don't even worry about that, so let's hold hands and sing kumbaya because that will be enough to fix an inherently and irredeemably white supremacist system.