Attacks on the Poor

I can't say I understand why my last blog post...admittedly in late June (disgraceful!)...doesn't seem to be up on the blog (or to exist anywhere), but I have been ruminating on this new post since I had an interesting encounter last weekend in my home station.

On Sunday, I returned from Williamsburg, so pleased that the G train was again running regularly on weekends. I went through the turnstiles at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, but found no one to metroshare with. This was disappointing, since I can almost always find someone near the turnstiles there who asks for and/or graciously accepts a free swipe and a smile. Ahh, well. When I came up the Bond Street stairs, a young man asked me for change. As I was returning from yoga, I had no change, but I asked him if he needed a ride. He did, so I walked him back to the turnstiles. I suggested that it was a better spot to wait in if what he wanted was a free swipe. Here's what he told me:

He has a court date coming up because he was ticketed for "manipulating the turnstile" the last time someone on her way out swiped him on his way in. The police stopped him and wanted to see his MetroCard. He explained that someone else paid his fare, but since he could not point her out (she was moving in the opposite direction, as metrosharers should be), they did not accept his story.

Now, there are a long list of things wrong here. I have been kicking myself all week for failing to get his name and court date. I did tell him about my blog and tell him that he (and the person who swiped him in) had done nothing wrong, and that my blog details the rules about sharing. It was impossible to believe that a white man would have been stopped and questioned for similar reasons. Even without the Henry Louis Gates arrest still quite fresh in the collective consciousness, this would have been striking. But I had just read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Is it Now a Crime to Be Poor," in the New York Times (August 8, 2009).

Ehrenreich writes:

By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, and his police chief William Bratton.

Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you're littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you're displaying gang allegiance.

It turns out that accepting the kindness of a fellow rider is another way for a poor person to be criminalized. Ehrenreich also writes about the crack-down on sharing, once believed to be a basic human activity:

The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.

I am still thinking about the best way to address the outrageous unfairness of what happened to the young man I met at Hoyt-Schermerhorn.