Abstract: Poverty as a culture is being exploited by the bourgeoisie. The ‘new age hippie’, or trustafarian, is a relatively new idea in the cultural sense, the original hippie movement only being about 40 years old. The rich exploit the aesthetic of the poor by framing it in a romanticized way, one of them being volunteer trips to third world countries. Celebrities and politicians try to connect with the general public by setting up a stage in which they perform feigned poverty, which leads to unrealistic media representation of the poor. Due to the lack of accurate representation between proletarian and bourgeoisie, the two groups have culturally collided and then combined, making poverty and wealth hard to detect, other than by recognizing stereotypes.

Key words: Trustafarian, Poverty, Cultural Appopriation, Aesthetics, Culture, TikTok, Hippies, Pop Culture, Celebrities, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Volunteer, Consumerism, Stereotypes

Review of Literature: According to Asteriti (2014), citing the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the image of the underclass has been violated by capitalism. According to Enebi (2016), slum tourism has harmed Africa in several ways, ending in violation of dignity.

Picture perfect poverty, unlike the life of actual proletarians, is meant to be aesthetically pleasing. Children share hand-me-downs with their siblings whom they love, mothers bake cakes on special occasions at which the children will look back fondly at throughout their whole lives, and hard-working fathers come home to hug their children with grime and sweat on their shirts. They are not uneducated, dirty, menacing or depressed. Celebrities tell success stories about their lives that they built with their bare hands, or if that is not the case, choose to keep their childhood a mystery. Photographs of malnourished African children with bloated abdomens and flies on their faces sell fair trade chocolate. Traditional manual labour is an embarrassing profession. “But aren’t the workers perhaps beautiful (Standen 2015, 79)?” This essay will view poverty as a culture and how it is being exploited by the rich.

A trustafarian is a derogatory term used to describe a young person from a wealthy background whose trust fund enables him or her to eschew conventional attitudes to work, dress, drug taking, etc (Dictionary.com 2024). It is a combination of the words Trust fund baby and Rastafarian. This is the new age hippie, where a white person with a monetary safety net goes on spirituality tours to Africa and South America to do volunteer work or find their true selves. An example of a trustafarian is TikTok influencer and singer Shanin Blake, a millionaire blonde white woman with dreads who takes drugs and sings about alien conspiracy theories while living in a mansion. Though Shanin has responded to the allegations of her being a trust fund baby by posting about her life struggles after being cut off from her family, it does not change the fact that she is the embodiment of cultural appropriation in the rich white hippie community, hence she will be used as an example nonetheless. Just believing in spirituality, peace and love is not the most prevalent hippie value. In the 60s and 70s, hippies were seen as revolutionaries, associated with the counterculture movement and anti-materialistic values. What has changed, so that the idea of hippies or hipsters is not associated with anti-consumerism but rather rich white people paying extra for soy milk in their coffee and applying beard oil?

Poverty has become less and less visible, and the bourgeoisie as well. Oftentimes both the rich and the relatively poor attend the same public schools, the same colleges, and sometimes even the same first part-time jobs. The difference is that one pair of worn sneakers were bought three years ago from Walmart, and the other are brand new from Balenciaga, purposefully pre-worn down. Working class young people pretend to be bourgeois students, adopting the tastes and fashions and pretentions of the bourgeoisie (Asteriti 2014, 3). But the bourgeois aesthetic is impossible to attain for the lower class, and they are switching places. Vintage polo shirts are easily attainable nowadays and relatively cheap, whereas Rick Owens shoes look like off-brand Converse sneakers. Being rich has become discreet. But a stereotype is easy to spot, one of the stereotypes being hipsters.

It costs more to be healthy, eco-friendly and high. It costs almost twice as much money to buy a single serving of salad than to buy a hamburger set from a fast-food restaurant. When someone can afford to make a choice in how they like their coffee and chia bagel sandwich, it is automatically an indication of pretentiousness. When someone has the ability to buy drugs and administer them in a safe location on a workday and preach about how free it makes them feel, that is a privilege. The people who say that there are more important things in life than money are from rich households. They romanticize how intimate and down-to-earth being poor is.

In 2019, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West posted a picture of them eating breakfast in a middle-class kitchen in sweatsuits. The picture is taken by someone else who is out of the frame while Kim and Kanye sit, looking casual while the photo is obviously shot with the flash on to give a grainy, nostalgic look. The photo feels like a production, something that has been staged. Even if the billionaires had not intended to look middle class, the photo certainly has its own intonations. Because the rich are seen as unapproachable to the public, politicians and celebrities often attempt to create a connection with the middle to lower class audience. They want to be viewed as “one of them”, “them” being the poor, to be seen as modest human beings. But being actually poor is not about modesty. It is reality.

Education, especially high-quality education, is still reserved for the privileged. Students can pay to get into Harvard. Most prestigious universities require students to do volunteer work, even better if it took place overseas. According to Project Volunteer Nepal, volunteers often romanticize local poverty because they feel that poverty symbolizes a non-commercialized, natural and beautiful world (Project Volunteer Nepal 2017). Citizens of third world countries appear “poor-but-happy”, detached from materialism, and overall appear pure to rich student volunteers. This is because they feel uncomfortable facing extreme poverty, and because of the need to overcome that inner conflict and shock, they come up with a negotiating strategy to view the poor as happy, minimalistic and authentic. This is the truth behind the gap year student’s newly found self, the doctrine that new age hippies preach about being grateful and free from materialistic values. The bourgeois students, now equipped with a twisted worldview, enter an echo chamber where the professors and other students only act as a reflection of their own shallowness.

The problem is not in the plane tickets, or the volunteer work package tour, or even the need to rationalize the shock from witnessing true poverty, but rather the ignorance that the rich possess. The misconception that the first world poor cannot possibly be poor because they own cell phones and live under a roof and the third world “poor-but-happy” individuals do not feed the ever-growing gap between social classes. Being unable to afford a car in which to drive to work, having to take out a loan to attend college or to buy a house, or being unable to pay for an unexpected medical bill is what being poor is in first world countries, and it is no less devastating. Even conventional middle-class citizens fit the criteria of modern poor. The modern poor need to prove their innocence, their poverty, because it is not openly evident yet crushing, while the rich complain about how a miniscule portion of their taxes are used to feed the “incompetent members of society”.

The myth of exotic poverty has led to horribly inaccurate media representation of being poor. The penniless main character of a movie is characterized by a messy three-room apartment in New York with piles of laundry and empty pizza boxes littering the spacious living room. They spend all their money that they have earned from their part time job on alcohol and drugs, and they are beautiful and skinny with their messy makeup and rugged leather jackets. They are criminals, prostitutes, or ex-government agents with a sad backstory. They eat cold leftovers straight from the fridge, they are disheveled but also mysterious and almost hot. Then, there is the polar opposite of hot poverty: slummy poverty. In 2013, Rick Ross shot a music video in Lagos, intentionally featuring some of the roughest parts of the city (Enebi 2016). It is the grand stereotype of African city come to life, heavily focusing on the negative imagery while Lagos and Africa itself has been fighting the wrongful perception for years. Viewing poverty as a culture, keeping in mind that being rich is also a culture, means this blunt misrepresentation is a form of cultural appropriation.

Because the two classes-the working class and the bourgeoisie-cannot be mixed, the only vantage point is media, whether it be social media or literature or cinema. In response, the privileged recognize being poor as eating cheap food or riding public transportation. South Korean politicians often try to gain citizens’ support by eating commonfolk food from outdoor marketplace vendors or riding the bus to work, while being surrounded by reporters and camera flashes. They shake hands with the usually-untouchable senior citizens gathering cardboard boxes to sell for mere pennies. The poor get shunned for trying to appear rich, buying imitation bags, while the rich and powerful get a pat on the back for acknowledging that the poor exist on the same planet as them.

In conclusion, the image of poverty, which is made up in itself, is inappropriately exploited by the bourgeoisie who do not understand the concept of being poor. The new age hippies are painfully unaware of how dystopian their existence is, and the modern poor are almost invisible and easily ignored. Consumerism is at its peak, where products for both the poor trying to appear rich and the rich yearning for the poverty chic look are flooding the market. This is capitalism at its worst, where the lack of capital has been monetized. 

Bibliography

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Dictionary.com. “Dictionary.com.” Accessed June 19, 2024. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustafarian.

Enebi, Ernest Danjuma. “The Exoticization of Poverty.” Medium, October 25, 2016. https://medium.com/@thedanjuma/the-exoticization-of-poverty-893cd0a10eac.

Hannam, Laura. “Kim Kardashian and Kanye West Mocked Online for ‘Pretending to Be Poor.’” Yahoo News, February 27, 2019. https://www.yahoo.com/news/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-mocked-online-pretending-poor-155531337.html.

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I’m fairly certain all of you have come across a bench with an iron bar attached in the middle, or sometimes even one that resembles an art installation than a bench. These are examples of hostile architecture. The seemingly pointless, misplaced concrete spikes under bridges or metal nubs, jagged rocks and poles along sidewalks or in small empty spaces have a sinister intention. No loitering and no homeless people allowed.

Sometimes hostile architecture is used to prevent skateboarding in public areas. While skateboarding may erode public structures and could cause harm to pedestrians, I disagree that this actually does any substantial harm to anyone. In fact, it has proved to bring life to abandoned lots. For instance, LOVE Park in Philadelphia was once home to drug dealers and gang activity, until skateboarders started to flood the park. Soon, workers from surrounding buildings and citizens started using the park again, and it was revitalized. If skateboarding poses safety issues with pedestrians, Rue Leon Cladel Alley Skatepark in Paris is a multi-purpose space with coloured pavement to indicate skateboarding spaces.

However, most hostile architecture exist to prevent the homeless from using the space. This is because crime rates increase where the homeless accumulate, and frankly, it just looks bad. Then why are people homeless? Some may have the audacity to say that the homeless are just lazy, unashamed and unmotivated people. But the top causes for homelessness are addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, sudden unemployment and lack of affordable housing due to economic instability. In America, 2023, 34,703 unaccompanied youth were counted homeless. This means that the youth in question is without a parent or guardian. Of those, 40.8 percent were unsheltered. Often times these young adults are kicked out of their family due to domestic violence, religion, sexual orientation and more. They are subject to sexual trafficking, various crimes and discrimination. Without a place to properly clean themselves or wash their clothes, it is near impossible for a homeless person to “go get a job”. Substance abuse, addiction and mental illnesses should be professionally treated, and if a state or city does not want addicts and the mentally ill on their streets, they should invest in welfare and rehabilitation programs, not get rid of possible shelters. Sometimes, it seems, that the homeless are not seen as citizens or even human beings. Considering that people of color and members of the LGBTQA+ community and the mentally ill are more likely to become homeless, this shows how ignorant some members of society can be.

Not only is hostile architecture ignorant of the homeless looking for shelter, /// disabled people, pregnant women and the elderly need proper seats. The leaning bars in New York City subways serve no purpose other than to provide a small bit of comfort to mostly able-bodied citizens. Even then, perfectly healthy people also get tired, and the leaning bench offers no proper resting space. Now there are no occupiable space without paying for something. Bumbling cafes do not mean the coffee is particularly good there, but rather that it is hot or cold outside, and the opposite inside. Parks have no loitering signs, comfy public benches are a thing of the past, and there is absolutely nothing one can do outside to pass the time without buying a cup of coffee. Time and space itself, it seems, has become capitalized.

Public spaces are meant to provide comfort to the general public without discrimination against physical and economic situation. If there is a homeless problem, that is due to the city’s inability to properly support its own citizens. Discreetly forcing the vulnerable out of sight is not the correct way to respond to a very real and consistent issue and will not ultimately stop crimes from taking place.

Don’t we sometimes forget that the idea of a society was created to support the weak and to share strength? Especially nowadays, when resources are more than abundant and always readily available to the privileged, why are we marginalizing the exploited, the ignored, and the homeless?