Righteous Dopefiend

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain discussions of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and child abuse, racism, and anti-gay bias.

Bourgois and Schonberg aim not only to document the intimate lives of Edgewater’s unhoused communities but also to show how those lives are shaped by political and social forces that limit their choices and opportunities. The anthropologists borrow Karl Marx’s term lumpen to describe the social position occupied by these communities: They are people who have been left behind by a shifting economy—people whose limited economic utility leads the system to treat them as disposable.

In their work, Bourgois and Schonberg make the assumption, which mainstream society treats as radical, that Edgewater residents are rational actors making reasonable decisions based on their situations. The residents’ understanding of the world is shaped by the systems and institutions they know: The deindustrialization of the US economy has deprived them of jobs, gentrification has driven them out of stable communities and eliminated affordable housing, and neoliberal policies have privileged the free market over the welfare of marginalized communities. The anthropologists suspend their moral judgment of actions that may be considered immoral in a normative framework—such as stealing or physically harming other people—to understand the worldview and circumstances within which these actions represent reasonable choices.

The book depicts several escalating levels of violence. First, there is the violence that individuals inflict upon themselves through the act of injecting drugs into their bodies. This can lead to health issues such as Hepatitis C, HIV and AIDS, abscesses, collapsed veins, and the degradation of internal organs, such as the severe liver damage that lands Petey in the hospital for extended periods of time.

The second level is interpersonal violence—the muggings that take place as a result of the struggle for more heroin or crack, or the use of physical force to assert power in familial dynamics. Often, men in these families act out patriarchal power by physically harming the children and women in their lives. The book asserts that this is meaningful for men whom society deems as inferior to other men because of their socioeconomic status or race/ethnicity. This connects to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, the mechanisms in a society that lead people to “misrecognize” inequality as simply the natural order of things rather than socially constructed. Bourgois and Schonberg argue that their interlocutors fall into writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s concept of the Grey Zone, where people are put in such compromising conditions (such as at a concentration camp) that it is not right to morally judge their actions. In fact, the ethnographers state that “condemning the actions of powerless victims collude with and exonerates those who are directly responsible for creating gray zones (Levi 1988, 1996)” (350).

The third level of violence is institutional. Law enforcement is the institutional arm that most commonly interacts with the people living on Edgewater Boulevard. The police constantly confiscate basic necessities, such as clothes and blankets, and destroy the shelters the Edgewater population depends upon as protection from the elements. The precarious stability the Edgewater population achieves at the beginning of the book in a relatively long-term encampment is completely upended when the government of California focuses policy on criminalizing homelessness. A concrete example of high-level, structural violence trickling down into the everyday lived experience of the Edgewater population comes in Chapter 7, when due to the inability to settle anywhere long-term, interlocutors have much less access to social services that provide clean needles and check-ins for health concerns. This leads to more dangerous needle practices and increasingly acute health concerns that land interlocutors in the county hospital, costing taxpayers dearly, even as many of their issues could have been prevented had harm reduction practices been deemed morally acceptable by government officials and policymakers.

Bourgois and Schonberg describe globalized neoliberalism as the broadest level of violence enacted upon the Edgewater population. This socioeconomic paradigm underpins government policies that privatize services and shunt public funding away from social services and public health initiatives while placing blame on individual actors for their moral shortcomings. Philosopher Michel Foucault explores this paradigm through his concept of biopower: Governments exert power over their citizens through internalized messaging on what health means and what a good body is. In the case of neoliberalism, a non-addicted body that works, contributes to the economy, and doesn’t draw on societal resources like Medicaid is considered a good body. Conversely, the bodies of unhoused people, addicted people, and/or people in poverty who are unable to stay healthy due to poor working conditions or lack of capital are considered immoral and not deserving of help. This paradigm results in political actors like President Ronald Reagan severely cutting funding to services that provide support to these communities, while people who interact with marginalized populations treat them as social pariahs who merit their current conditions due to their immoral personal choices.