A Group of Homeless Heroin Injectors

Unfortunately, where ever you go and where ever you live, there will always be a group of homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers social networks. In the article Intimate Apartheid, the author talks about ethnic dimensions of habitus among homeless heroin injectors in California and their interpersonal relations between African Americans, whites and Latinos, although mostly focusing on the tension between blacks and whites. Habitus allows us to see how an individual can achieve personal desires, which eventually becomes imprinted as individualized behavior. The author talks about habitus and uses it in the article to describe how the African Americans and the whites had established rituals and ways they were and dealt with their heroin addiction. It was something that was part of them and their daily lives.

One of the components of habitus that is discussed in the article is about the income–generation strategies or techniques. The whites and African Americans rely on distinct combinations of income-generating strategies. In summary, the whites earn the bulk of their income from passive begging. They make signs and post along the highway to elicit contributions of small change from commuters, such as ‘Please help, God bless, Vietnam, Will work for food.’ The whites are often dressed in rags and dirty cloths with their eyes on the ground. The whites would elicit pity and disgust precipitating gifts of spare change.

The whites also often work part-time as off the books, for small business owners in the neighborhood, who are usually of European descent. Typically they are hired for only several hours per day on discrete manual labor tasks, such as sweeping the sidewalk, unloading trucks, or stocking items in stores while receiving below minimum wage and obtain a proportion of their income from recycling cans and scavenging through garbage dumpsters.

In contrast, the African Americans in our network rarely fly signs or beg passively. When they do panhandle, it is usually accompanied by both visual and verbal contact. African Americans offer services such as washing a wind- shield at a gas station. A lot of times the like to make fun off or even threaten potential contributors and sometimes demanding money. Most prominently, a larger percentage of their income is generated by burglary at construction sites, warehouses and car trunks. The African Americans also tend to be very knowledgeable and professional at what the steal.

As the whites, the African Americans are hardly ever employed as day laborers by local businesses. Instead they love to criticize the relationships that the whites develop with employers. They feel that part time employment at local businesses is very demeaning, exploitative and feminizing. The whites often persuade small business owners that they are worthy homeless people. They tend show much appreciation for the favor of receiving below- minimum-wage payment and no benefits. Furthermore, many of the storekeepers and small business owners who hire the white heroin injectors manipulatively pay only the cost for the minimum dose of a morning dose of heroin to their favorite homeless person. This guarantees the employer that every morning this particular addict, driven by impending heroin with- drawl symptoms, will come back to work.

According to the article there are several differences of homelessness and drug use between the African American users and the white users.

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