Resentful giving

Shortly after I first moved here, one of my neighbors - let's call him Bill - knocked on the door.  It was evening time, pouring with rain, and the sun had long since gone down.  He wanted my roommate, Paul, to drive him back to the mall to return a television he'd bought that he decided he didn't want.  Paul wasn't home, so instead I called Bill a cab.  We chatted for a few minutes until the cab came, and then he went on his way.

This was my first mistake.  Afterward, Bill became a regular visitor.  He'd knock on our door at least twice a week asking for any number of things.  Rides.  Bread.  Coffee filters.  Light bulbs.  Eggs.  Batteries.  He always promised to 'return the favor,' and never did - it's not that we ever expected or asked him too.  At first it was a nuisance, then it came to feel invasive.  Bill liked to sit on the front deck of our apartment (he lived in the adjacent apartment, so it was technically a shared stoop) and he'd go off on long winded stories whenever we left or entered the house.  I found him harmless until he started calling me his girlfriend and telling me how he was going to marry me.  Then I stopped answering the door.  When Paul wasn't home, I kept all the lights off except for my bedroom so Bill wouldn't think anyone was home.  I dreaded exiting and entering the apartment when I saw his shadowy figure on the stoop, and a I felt similarly every time the doorbell rang and I hid in my bedroom.

After about six months at this apartment, I moved.  Now, Bill was not the only or even the primary reason I moved, but he was certainly a pretty good reason.  Bill showed me the luxury of having a space whose boundaries and possessions were not challenged.  My class privilege now allows me the wonders of an apartment where nobody ever asks me for anything.

But there is more to the story than just me cashing in on my class privilege and relocating.  Bill was a middle-aged black man who I'd gauge as working class.  Bill reminded us of our race and class privilege in an uncomfortable way - by asking us for stuff, and us being too white-bread polite to say 'get off my porch and stop asking me to give you stuff I bought for myself, jerko.'  So we enabled him to keep asking.  We felt used and put upon, but neither of us told Bill that we'd rather him not consider us his own personal corner store anymore.  I think that's because we believed we should give Bill what he asked for, even though we didn't want to.  Bill saw two white graduate students and figured we could probably spare these things.  And we could.  To be honest, I'm fairly sure Bill could have, too.  But that's really not the point.  He asked, we gave...although we weren't very happy about it.  That is the point - why were we giving so begrudgingly?

Let me tell you another uncomfortable story.

I never give money to people who ask me on the street.  And I mean no one - I don't even donate to charity causes.  This is a decision I came to many years ago, although it is not one that has gotten easier with every refusal.  I remain as nervous and awkward and inwardly scrutinizing about saying 'no' to financial assistance or charitable giving on the street as I have always been.

There are panhandlers who pop up from time to time on the main street by my current apartment. There is a middle aged white woman, always cleanly dressed, who has asked me rather politely for money upwards of two dozen times in the year and a half I've been here.  Even though I always refuse her, she asks again and again, even when I cross her path multiple times in the same afternoon.  I hadn't seen her for a while, but she was stationed by the laundromat earlier today.

First, let me say that, after I refused her for the first time on my way out of the laundromat, I went out of my way to avoid refusing her again, to the point of walking all the way around the block to get back to the laundromat.  I realize this is ridiculous.  I felt ridiculous doing it.  But that is how deeply the ickiness of class consciousness sits with me, to where I would walk considerably out of my way to not have to 'deal with' the discomfort of refusing her.  (Never mind the discomfort she likely feels in constantly asking and being refused.)

When I left the laundromat again, I saw her a few paces away and prepared myself for another refusal.  But a different panhandler, one sitting on the bench beside the laundromat, got to me first.  He is another regular, a white, middle-aged man who was disheveled, dressed in dirty clothes, and did not appear to have bathed for some time.  I'm fairly sure he has sustained brain damage from many years of substance abuse.  "Can you spare some change?" he asked, his garbled voice hinting as much.  I chirped my usual, "No, sorry!" and marched onward.

I thought after just witnessing me turn down this man, the woman wouldn't bother.  But as I walked by, she piped up.  "That's why people won't give me money."

I paused, not sure if she'd said what I thought she had said.  "What's that?" 

"Him looking like that; people not taking care of themselves.  That's why people won't give me money."

"Oh."  I laughed nervously, then raised my bottle of detergent in a half wave.  "Well, take care!"

So I'm really not good at these things.  Reflecting on them gives me that twisty feeling inside, because I'm not happy about turning down these folks and I'm also pretty certain I'll continue to turn them down.  And I do realize I'm being hard on myself.  We all have the right to a quiet, safe home life and to not have to speak to people we don't wish to speak to or give money when we do not want to - some of us, however, have greater access to this than others.  Some of us can opt out of walking on the main streets.  Some of us do not have to leave the house to wash our clothes.  Some of us can drive cars instead of taking public transportation.  Some of us can avoid living where poor people live.  Some of us can avoid being poor.

What struck me, though, is how the woman blamed the other man for ruining her business.  I'm decent and he's not, she seemed to be saying.  How will people give me money if they associate me with him?  As I walked away from the pair, I wondered whether there was a hierarchy of panhandling.  We know that resentment is directed down the class hierarchy, not up - and the woman, rather than see an ally in the man, saw him as a drain on her game.  We resent the presumed imposition of the poor in the same way the woman resented the imposition of someone who was - visibly, at least - poorer that she was.  It's interesting to me that she thought that wearing nicer clothes (she was dressed better than me, but since I was in sweats, that wasn't saying much) would mean a higher yield.  I wondered if it was true - does looking more 'respectable' make it easier to give?

Then I remembered Bill.  Nah, I thought.  It's always a pain in the ass. 

And then after I thought that I felt pretty heartless again.

I see two sides to this resentful giving.  The first is the classist part.  We only want to give when we feel like it, when it suits us, when we don't have to be contaminated by the process of being begged or goaded.  The begging and the goading taints the high-minded philanthropy we fancy.  Their asking feels like an imposition - because it is an imposition.  It is an imposition on our privilege to gallivant through life without being put upon to give anything up.  "This is my money/batteries/porch!  You can't have it!"  That sort of unfortunate childishness.

The second side is perhaps more forgiving.  Because people with a whole lot less than me are also asked by the Bills and panhandlers to give, and I doubt they are happy about it all the time, either.  Sometimes we do have to (gulp) say 'no.'  Giving can be endless, and unless you can detach any emotion from your bread or your money, it's always going to result in resentful giving.  It's on us to do the reflective work to figure out where it is that we will give, and how.

Short-term payments are reactive and stunted...they ensure the system lives on...and sometimes if we do give, we have to be at peace with that, too.  The point is to always be doing other things that will, hopefully, make it so one day no one will have to ask.