[Xmca-l] Re: Nakesha

[Helena Worthen]

Hello —
I read the whole NYTimes article posted by Annalisa about the woman who died on the streets in NY — a young woman, 45, Black, mother of two children born while she was homeless.  The story is upsetting for many reasons. 

One, because living in the Bay Area, I see whole homeless encampments — tent villages, under the freeway overpasses, along the grassy medians of streets lined with nice restaurants, and beside bike paths. At night the door ways of downtown shops become occupied with bodies in sleeping bags. 

Reason number two is that the article focuses on the help that was offered to Nakesha and mostly refused. Not only old friends from college (she graduated from Williams), but also people who walked past her and talked with her and gave her things,  and then city social service workers who reached out to her. One NYC worker recorded visiting her and speaking with her over 300 times. She was well enough known to be interviewed on TV about whether people on the street should be moved to shelters or not when the temperature dropped. Two men who ran food trucks fed her, sometimes for free. Psychiatrists talked with her.  

So the overall impact of the article to me seems to say, “Here is a woman with talent and potential who refuses the help that would have allowed her to lead a more normal life: she is schizophrenic but won’t accept medication or shelters.” The article, it seems to me, puts all the blame on her.  It also unfortunately notes that what ultimately kills her is a complication of obesity: she is only 5 feet tall but weighs over 250 pounds at the time of her death.

I really don’t want to hear someone say, “I read an article in the NYTimes about this homeless woman who refused help 300 times!” - and suggest that this is typical.

So  although this article tells a terribly sad story, it undercuts the brutal fact of homelessness in the US by seeming to say homelessness is a matter of individual choice (you can choose to accept medication for schizophrenia or not), not a social problem for all of us. 

Should I, based on this story, decide to think that the crowds living on the street are all there because they refuse social services, won’t go into a shelter, won’t take their medications? That’s what the story would lead me to think. 

The loss of good jobs in academia is part of the homelessness story; maybe I sit in a place in the discourse where stories of adjuncts losing their jobs, trying to live on one class per semester, losing their healthcare when their assignments drops below 50%, art teachers sleeping in their studios, others in their cars are heard more often than elsewhere, but I don’t think so. I’m sure people on this list are aware of the overall deterioration of academic labor, if not experiencing it themselves.

But organizers would say, “It’s not what they do to you; it’s what we do for ourselves.” 

Mike asked a while ago if xmca had a collective response to the challenge of being able to do academic work, given the changes in higher ed — loss of  funding, anti-intellectualism in our government, loss of tenure track lines, explosion of student debt, cost of tuition, grant-dependent research where the tail wags the dog, etc etc.  I think xmcc is a collective response. Add in the journal, Mind Culture and Activity, and the ISCAR conferences, and the partcipants from all over the world, including some with historical memory!!! — that’s a response. Not that it pays for groceries.

Kind regards (I love the way Annalisa signs off…)

Helena 




Helena Worthen
helenaworthen@gmail.com
Berkeley, CA 94707 510-828-2745
Blog US/ Viet Nam: 
helenaworthen.wordpress.com
skype: helena.worthen1







> On Mar 3, 2018, at 9:25 AM, Jessica Kindred <kindred.jessica@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I also remember my shock at the homelessness in San Francisco. I think part of it, coming from New York, was that so much of it was actually on the street. In New York, it tends to be underground in the subway us or in shelters, and of course, sometimes on the actual street as well.  I recently was in Denver Colorado, and was shocked at the number of people lining sidewalks and I asking for money at crosswalks.
> That is to say, American homelessness is shocking even from an inside the US point of view.
> Jessie K.
> 
> On Mar 3, 2018, at 12:05 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for sharing, Annalisa. Really nice case story a la Oliver Sacks. I have yet to read the whole, but, 3900 unsheltered homeless people just in New York City??? 
> 
> I had never been in the US until I moved to live a couple of years in BC, Canada, and the first time I got the chance to visit the US was San Francisco, for a conference. I was there only the time strictly needed to go to bed, wake up, walk to the conference venue in SF downtown, and back to the hotel in the evening to leave early next morning. In my brief walk, I got to see more homeless people that I had never seen before, and I remember thinking that, if that scene I saw would suddenly occur in a city in Spain (where I am from) or Norway, there would be a social alarm and everyone would be talking about that all the time. Of course, I also thought that letting down the thousands of Syria refugees that the Spanish government had committed to host but never did would also cause a huge alarm and revolt... but nothing has happened. Yet, the issue in the US cities looks totally bizarre for an outsider's sight.
> 
> Alfredo  
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
> Sent: 03 March 2018 17:34
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l]   Nakesha
> 
> Hello fellow Xmcars,
> 
> 
> I wish there were technology that didn't send us to the moon, but instead refused to let anyone be homeless while fervently advocating for anyone to contribute their best gifts and insights.
> 
> 
> I noticed this today in the NYT and the sentence below stood out to me in particular. I thought it was a wonderful activity for children. Or maybe adults?
> 
> 
> "Once, she said, Nakesha had each student invent a holiday and write about how it would be celebrated, the values it promoted and what artifacts would be involved."
> 
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/nyregion/nyc-homeless-nakesha-mental-illness.html
> 
> 
> 
> kind regards,
> 
> 
> Annalisa
>