Written by Jason Rosencrantz
The people who live in L.A.’s Skid Row are often mistaken (by those whose privilege is defended by our classist and racist system) for something other than fully human.
In this way the racialized poor are relegated to that nether region reserved also for aliens and terrorists — subhumans all, worthy of disposal by whatever means.
Sometimes this dismissal of humanity can come in quite literal forms, as in the recent move by L.A.’s City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, who is using his resources to target the homeless and deny them the most basic human rights. In what even the L.A. Times is calling a “misguided use of resources”, Trutanich’s office is appealing a federal injunction that “barred the city’s Bureau of Street Services and police from seizing or destroying the unattended property of homeless people in downtown’s skid row neighborhood.”
In other words, the City Attorney of Los Angeles, who has also earned a reputation for trampling the rights of pot smokers, street artists, protesters, wants to confiscate and destroy even the modest possessions of the city’s most dispossessed people.
In arguing for this power before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this month, one of Trutanich’s minions actually went so far as to claim that homeless people don’t have a “constitutionally protected property right.”
Our friends at LA CAN have written about this and collected some of the choice audio from the deliberations in court, set to the music of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. Listen and wonder:
Audio from U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Preliminary Injunction by LA CAN
About the T Shirt Graphic, from Rick Klotz:
This is a photo I shot 6 years ago of a skid row resident named “Africa”. I was shooting Skid Row people, and she was friends with an older friend of mine that helps a handful of people out there.
She really took the portrait session seriously and showed up all stoic in her fashionable get up. That’s what I like about this particular portrait.
T-shirt available exclusively at Reserve Online.
original graphic 2008