By Jamal Khan, HAC Staff Attorney
I was working a drop-in shift at HAC one Wednesday afternoon last month, providing brief services to anyone who stopped by our Berkeley office. Our main responsibility as staff attorneys consists of helping clients apply for disability benefits, but we take periodic shifts to help a broader set of folks with smaller matters. One of the people who dropped in was East Asian. My own heritage is South Asian. At HAC, we don’t often see clients who look like me or him, although there has been an uptick recently.
This particular individual clearly had difficulties, including impaired vision. I did my best to help him fill out forms and access resources. As I did, a thought flashed in my mind. Two years ago, in the state of Manipur, on the eastern side of India, a group of people who looked like me committed war crimes against a group of people who looked like him. And not too far from there, in the country of Myanmar, a group of people who looked like him committed war crimes against a group of people who looked like me.
After my shift was over, I tried to identify the common thread between those crimes against humanity, those atrocities. And my conclusion was that every genocide in history, including the Holocaust, has been preceded by a language of dehumanization against the targeted group, making it seem like they are less than human.
Dehumanization, pushed to the extreme, leads to genocide. But dehumanization can also be more subtle and systemic.
Every genocide in history has been preceded by a language of dehumanization against the targeted group, making it seem like they are less than human.
During college, I interned with a bankruptcy attorney. We were helping a client fill out paperwork to file with the court. In the address field, he had scrawled a post office box number. The attorney said, “The court doesn’t like to see a PO Box. Do you have any other address?” He had none. He lived in his car. The court was subtly infused by a set of dehumanizing expectations that this client was unable to meet.
Recently, while creating a podcast about the opioid crisis, I sat in on a number of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings for research purposes. As I heard people’s stories, a creeping realization pervaded my consciousness, informed by my reading. Out of those who were there, some would relapse. Out of those who relapsed, some would overdose. And out of those who overdosed, some would not survive. I was sitting in a room with a group of individuals, face to face, with the keen awareness that some would not be there a year later. That was the statistical truth. When a regular attendee was suddenly absent, I wondered. We all wondered.
But that wasn’t the only thing I took away from those meetings. I also heard stories that couldn’t be quantified in charts and graphs.
One middle-aged man reflected, “For years, I went to meetings. I met others. We hung out, not just during NA meetings. Simple stuff, nothing complicated. Talking, joking, laughing. And it saved our lives.” There was a reason why opioid overdose deaths peaked during the COVID lockdowns, then gradually declined in recent years. Isolation aggravates addiction, because the opposite of addiction is connection.
A woman described her moment of deep despair after her opioid addiction wrecked her finances, her friendships, and her family relationships. One night, she deliberately overdosed. The following morning, she opened her eyes. She had woken up. She remained in the world of the living. She took that as a sign from a higher power that it wasn’t time for her to depart, that there was hope. Since that night, she had avoided relapse.
Isolation aggravates addiction, because the opposite of addiction is connection.
Another woman made an offhand remark that lingered in my mind: “Don’t give up until the miracle happens.”
Here’s what I know from my experience. We cannot save every life. However, if we try, we can help to save some lives, and we can dramatically improve the quality of many more lives. I strongly believe in peer-reviewed research and evidence-based approaches. At the same time, I understand that while it is easy to predict aggregate outcomes, each and every individual is unique, with a fate that is inextricably tied to a broad array of factors, many outside the control of a single provider or government agency. I try to have the humility to understand that no individual outcome is pre-determined, that there are phenomena which appear to skirt by our traditional notions of cause and effect.
A few years ago, I was working on a local political campaign. It was late October, and I drove past a line of RVs parked by the curb, a sight that is all too common in the Bay Area. On the side of one RV, the occupant had hung simple Halloween decorations. And that moved me. Even under such fraught circumstances, there was an effort to conjure a sense of normalcy, to hearken back to when times were better.
We’ve all heard the words, the pejoratives. Blight. Eyesore. Nuisance. But in that moment, passing by on the eve of an election, I saw a human, whose hopes and fears and dreams were as legitimate and as earnest as my own. The following year, I joined the Homeless Action Center as a staff attorney.
Some of my clients are unhoused. Others I first met when they were incarcerated. And still others I first encountered in a psychiatric hospital after they had been 5150’d. A 5150 is when someone is involuntarily committed because they are deemed by the state to be a risk to themselves or to others. No matter what situation a client is in when I meet them and begin to represent them, I keep HAC’s guiding philosophy in mind: I see their humanity.
A mentor once told me, “Public interest work may not be as lucrative as what’s in the private sector, but it will always be more interesting, and more meaningful.” That has certainly been the case for me here at HAC.