Can One Truly Pull Themselves Up By Their Bootstraps?

An Essay

Walking off the Fullerton bus stop, I see my homeless friend. We’ve sat, talked, and connected with each other before on various occasions usually just sitting outside of Whole Foods. I would say we definitely developed a friendship.We laughed, and made jokes about being Black in America, but the truths of his reality haunt me every night as I lie my head on my pillow. Closing my eyes, I pray to God to continue to use me in ways to service of others. His reality is he is a homeless Black man trying everyday to pull himself up by his bootstraps. And he is mimicking how European immigrants once did it, but the reality is white supremacy in America targets to annihilate Black men in vulnerable positions like impoverishment. His reality soon became K 9 Unit officers harassing him and arresting him for not having state issued ID. My friend later tells me the story, he tried to reason with the officer, explaining that he was simply trying to get money to catch the train to church. But the K 9 Unit Officers proceeded to emasculate him further by forcing him to stop everything he wanted to do that day to take him to the police station and figure out who he is exactly. Five hours in a jail cell, my homeless friend was finally regurgitated back into the world. Pulling up his bootstraps maybe for the 5th or 6th time that day, he makes it back to Fullerton where I see him again. Before I approach him, I see another Black man taunting him. Telling him that he too was homeless, and that he should not be outside of Whole Foods begging for money. The other Black brother was telling my homeless friend that he feeds himself and pays for his own bus fare, lastly he was telling him to get up and just do it. From my position all I could see on my friend’s face was sadness as his head hung low covering his sign, gazing at his bootstraps. Not a word, but all I hear was him cursing his broken bootstraps in his head over and over again. But in his hands, my friend was reading a book called “Finding Hope”. I walked up to him and all I could say is “It’s a beautiful day to be reading.”

America functions in the favor of white supremacy and patriarchy by enforcing violent hierarchies within different social constructions like race, class, and gender. My friend does not have the same bootstraps as the European immigrants or any other token person. Intersectionality makes our experiences and the shoes we walk in specifically different. Different as in needing different philosophies and resources other than “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” and “just do it”. My friend was experiencing invasion and violence from racist and classist officers as well lack of cultural support from another Black man who has been a similar position. My friend is 22 years old, and trapped in a reality of being pushed back on the cold ground every time he attempts to use his agency to find that opportunity America “offers.” He is homeless, he has nowhere to grieve and reflect on these traumatic daily experiences. So when he is sad in public after he just got released from jail, he becomes a target of more humiliation. I do not agree with the reinforcement of the philosophy “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, it is a violence, it is a crime to say. But the book “Finding Hope”, my friend was midway through. I peeked on a page while he was talking to me about his situation and saw Hebrews 4:15-16 written before a very long passage. After we parted ways, I looked up the verse in my Bible App on my iPhone. “The High Priest of our understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most” Hebrews 4:15-16 NLT. Pursuing African and Black Diaspora studies, I have been exposed to various ideas of love by Black leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. practiced and preached, agape love. In his work, An Experiment in Love, he talks about agape as a love in action and how it manifests from the needs of your neighbor. It is a disinterested love that cannot and will not discriminate between societal definitions of “worthy” and “unworthy” people. To practice agape love is to take courageous lengths to restore our broken communities. I believe in my friend’s liberation from his situation, because I believe in the work that has to be done by myself and others to help him. And when he is no longer homeless it will be because he sought knowledge in the worst of conditions. Then he made connections with people sharing his story and listening to theirs. When that day comes, I do not think either me or him will consider that “pulling himself up by his bootstraps”, because it required humanity to recognize and value his differences to actively deliver him from the violence of homelessness.