ABSTRACT
The current period of homelessness in the United States dates back to approximately 1979 and 1980 when advocates, reporters, social workers, and others began to notice a significant number of people with no place to live in. Despite many thousands of articles in our newspapers, stories on television, and discussions and websites on the Internet, aspects of this issue still remain almost uncommented on. One important silence in most of the literature about homelessness is race. While figures (see Table 42.1) clearly show evidence that African-Americans are by far overrepresented in the homeless population relative to their numbers (Native Americans are also overrepresented), a search of the academic journals and newspapers finds minimal discussion of this fact. When the discussion about race does appear, it is invariably downplayed. Moreover, the minor mentions of race do not include the structural inequities that have plagued AfricanAmericans throughout history-structural inequities that continue to run amuck. This chapter explores the data about homelessness and the African-American community, speculates on why this issue has not received much attention, and notes the chief causes of the gap between the high rate of homelessness among African-Americans and other racial/ethnic groups. The discussion is shaped by the success over the last three decades of neoliberal economic and policy changes along with new ideologies that buttress neoliberalism. Prior to these decades, economic and political elites in the United States and other “advanced nations” tolerated greater provisions of social welfare, cooperation with trade unionism, and even some efforts to undo the historic oppression of people of color in order to ensure the social peace. Over the last decades, however, the drive for profits has shaped a new capitalist state that has been able to shed many of the fruits of prior legislation from the New Deal to the 1970s. As part of this change, a major impact has also been the weakened oppositional discourses with particular hostility in the media and even in academia to older discourses about social class and racial justice and inequality. These views are scoffed at as “outdated” and not relevant to the current economy and polity as they are remnants of the previous eras (such as “1960s rhetoric”).
