Editor’s note: Issac Bailey is a longtime journalist based in South Carolina who writes for McClatchy. He will be a professor of practice at Davidson College in the fall after serving as a visiting professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism in the spring. He’s the author of “My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty and Racism in the American South.” His latest book is “Why Didn’t We Riot? A Black Man in Trumpland.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
A few weeks ago, I bought a young Black homeless man a chicken sandwich and a drink. I was on Eighth Avenue, just a few blocks down from Madison Square Garden, when I saw him holding the door open to the fast-food restaurant. He made it clear, not with words but with a quiet nod, he was hoping one of the entering customers would buy him something to eat, so I did.
I don’t know what that sandwich did for that man. For me, I felt as though my efforts amounted to a drop in the bucket. I wanted to see him, treat him as the full-complex human being he is — a man made in God’s image just as I have been made in God’s image — but instead walked away not sure whether I had belittled us both. I felt ethically impotent — knowing that I alone couldn’t lift him into a better life — and morally bankrupt, knowing that I had the resources to offer more than just a chicken sandwich and a drink.
Truth be told, I don’t know why I bought him the sandwich. A sense of duty? He caught me in a giving mood? Truth be told more fully, when I initially saw him, I considered finding another restaurant, not wanting to be disturbed by his existence. It was one of many encounters I had with the homeless I remembered when I heard what happened to Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless Black man who was a well-known Michael Jackson impersonator in New York City.
On May 1, Neely boarded the F train and shouted that he was hungry, thirsty and tired of having nothing before a Marine veteran placed him in a chokehold (later saying, through his attorney, that he felt Neely posed a threat to passengers). Neely was later pronounced dead at a hospital. (The Manhattan district attorney’s office is investigating, and no charges have been brought.) Though New York City’s medical examiner said the direct cause of death was compression of the neck, I can’t shake the feeling that I was among the indirect causes.
When I got to New York in late December, I largely went along with the status quo, an acceptance of the routine dehumanization of fellow human beings, fellow human beings like Neely and an estimated 68,900 others. I wasn’t protesting in the subway station where Neely was killed, like some New Yorkers have begun doing, to raise awareness and a sense of urgency. Instead, I quickly perfected the art of rendering the homeless all but invisible, much more concerned about my own convenience — will the train get me to my destination on time? — than their plight.
I’m not new to homelessness. I grew up in the small town of St. Stephen, South Carolina, where my mom essentially turned our house into a de facto, one-stop shop for homeless and mentally ill men and women, and others down on their luck. She did that, even though we needed food stamps and free government cheese to survive. I grew up helping her help them.
As a professional journalist, I had a breakthrough story about the growing homeless population in Myrtle Beach, one of the top resort areas in the country. A photojournalist and I spent several nights over a few weeks inside a homeless shelter, and on the streets with the unhoused, getting to know them, their habits, their wants and their dreams.
Maybe that’s why I wasn’t expecting the issue of homelessness to gnaw away at me like it did in New York. But I wasn’t so much bothered by the presence of homeless people as I was bothered by my own feelings of helplessness.
It was impossible not to see them, not to be reminded that we’ve accepted an enormous amount of inequality in the wealthiest country in the world, even in the heart of the banking capital of the world. (Poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death of Americans behind only heart disease, cancer and smoking, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside.)
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Read More: Opinion: How we all played a role in Jordan Neely’s death on a subway train