“A Kinder, Gentler War on the Poor” Part 2

This essay follows from “A Kinder, Gentler War on the Poor”

A statue of Jesus Christ as a homeless man sleeping rough. (source)

It’s probably most obvious when it regards policing homelessness: our governments make it illegal to sleep under bridges, in public parks, or in cars. There’s only one reason to do this, of course. We might make some meaningless excuse about preventing unauthorized camping, but come on, Boy Scouts aren’t pitching tents in the park. The only reason to criminalize public sleeping is to create a crime that only applies to the homeless.

In other words, we don’t bust homeless people because they’re committing crimes; we create categories of crimes to bust homeless people. By this logic, “criminal” isn’t something people become because they commit crimes, but something people innately are, and we write laws to target them. Not coincidentally, these innate criminals match social categories we’ve been taught to despise on sight: the poor, the non-White, immigrants, homosexuals.

I’ve always been conscious of this on some level, though only recently have I processed how widespread the phenomenon is. Laws against “blocking the sidewalk” supposedly exist to stop street crime, but are enforced almost entirely against people who are poor, Black, or both. One of the first things that happens when well-off White people move into poor ethnic neighborhoods, is they start making nuisance calls to police about young people loitering.

Back in high school, I remember the administration writing new rules against students wearing “gang colors.” These standards were ominously vague, and largely meant bright, vibrant shades of red or blue. (This was the peak of media-driven paranoia about the Crips and the Bloods.) Notably, these rules were only enforced against Black and Hispanic students, who started wearing only faded denim and white t-shirts to appear as nondescript as possible.

Not that the rules were never enforced against White students. I saw White friends reprimanded for violating “gang colors” rules twice. Both times involved tying brightly colored bandanas around their neck or hair. In other words, White students were only targeted by anti-Black rules when they did something stereotypically Black. This means the rules did double duty, forcing Black students into mute compliance, while forcing White students into middle-class conformity.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his
favorite pose: angrily lecturing the crowd

Currently, we’re witnessing this same pattern evolving in Florida, where the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill is inventing categories of law specifically targeting LGBTQIA+ Floridians. Demonstrating conventionally gay behaviors, dressing in supposedly gay manners, or teaching schoolchildren about sexual and gender identities, have become unlawful in America’s third most populous state. Like the “gang colors” rule, the law nominally covers everyone, but will only get enforced against nonconformists.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has needed to manufacture claims of harm to justify these rules. Talk about “grooming,” kiddie-diddling, and protecting children’s innocence, is used to justify ham-fisted crackdowns. But I cannot believe, for one damn minute, that Governor DeSantis thinks talking about gender will spoil schoolchildren’s innocence. He knows as well as anybody what motivates this legislation: he’s creating rules to punish creepy out-group members.

It’s important how frequently Christianity, and specifically Levitical Law, gets cited to reinforce these rules. Like American law, Levitical Law involves definite claims of material harm: thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit murder, thou shalt not commit adultery. But other laws about, say, eating shellfish, wearing mixed cloth, and getting tattoos, aren’t about preventing harm. They’re about creating an in-group identity: Thou Shalt Not Do What Foreigners Do.

But I believe Jesus, a Jew who lived during times when a conquering Empire used the Temple priesthood as a proxy government, would recognize what’s happening here. An authoritarian central government is using state power to arbitrarily punish anybody who deviates from state-sponsored identity categories. Whether those identities are economic (sleeping rough), sexual (dress to match your genitals), or racial (don’t dress like the Black kids).

I don’t support total lawlessness. We need consequences for people who commit robbery, rape, and murder. But huge swaths of law exist to enforce conformity, punish deviance, and push certain groups into permanent outlaw status. When our legislatures pass laws that criminalize, for instance, whatever Black people do, the message is clear: Black people are criminals by nature. They don’t necessarily commit crimes; their actions just are crimes, in advance.

Homelessness, gangs, sexual purity: the rhetoric surrounding these actions exists entirely to punish out-group members for things they can’t control. We don’t punish people because they commit crimes; we create criminal categories because people’s actions cause responses of revulsion and disgust among the in-group. But, from high school cliques to Fascist states, history proves that the in-group is never appeased.