I was 'homeless' — because that's my job

Stephanie Wang is the Equality Matters reporter for The Indianapolis Star. She covers a wide range of issues, such as discrimination, cultural awareness and social change.

For one hour on a recent weeknight, I was going to be homeless.

Not really. But as I started exploring the various topics within my new reporting assignment at The Star, I was curious about this particular event — a poverty simulation hosted by the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention of Indy.

The simulation worked like this: My "life cards" had literally been dealt and handed to me in an envelope. I was role-playing as a 23-year-old who had grown up in foster care, but whose dreams had been dimmed by the struggles of providing for a family of five.

But, while for me this was a convenient game of pretend, these cards were based on someone's real-life story.

The mezzanine of City Market was set up like the city of Indianapolis. We walked around with a list of basic needs but without knowing where to go or how to get help.

"If you have questions," said Joe Spaulding, who created the poverty simulation, "I can't help you — because that's life."

My simulated character had it better off than many others: I had a low-paying job, I wasn't addicted to drugs, and I had both a birth certificate and identification.

Sure, I had a job, but I didn't earn enough to put a roof over my head or afford a car. Then again, I couldn't qualify for financial assistance — because I had a job.

I overheard a man talking to his wife. "It's not like a game you can win," said Gary Katona, 53, after he couldn't get a job in the simulation, "because you never get dice to roll."

For us, these frustrations lasted only an hour. And the whole time, we knew, in truth, we had money in our wallets and comfortable homes to sleep in.

Katona, a property manager in Lebanon, said he encounters people experiencing hardships on a daily basis. But, with the prevalence of people he sees receiving disability support, he wondered about how many poor and homeless people really wanted to work for a better life — and how many had just given up.

He came to the poverty simulation, he said, to gain some perspective.

"It's always humbling," Katona said, "to get a little bit closer to the heart of what people are going through."

That's my job now. I'm the equality reporter for the Indy Star, but what that really means is I cover inequalities.

What I write about might be difficult for us to talk about. But we need to have more of these sometimes tough and awkward conversations about race and religion, about wage and opportunity gaps, about being different and being treated differently.

We need to talk about inequalities because cities are exploding in riots and people are running from cops. Women are running for president. More women than ever — and the first Latina justice — sit on the bench of the country's highest court, which happens to be currently considering a social issue that has stridently divided us: Will same-sex couples be granted the same rights as heterosexual couples to legally marry?

And the national discourse resonates here in Indiana, a state that is often seen as being slow to change and yet is rapidly changing.

One visible example: In the three-year span from 2010 to 2013, U.S. Census data show Indianapolis' population growth was driven by increasing numbers of minority residents, in contrast to a concurrent decline in the share of white residents.

Your peers won't always look like you. They won't always believe what you believe, and they won't always speak the way you speak.

While we often like to believe we could live in a colorblind utopia, we're caught in this perfect contradiction. On one hand, we celebrate diversity as a founding principle of this nation. But when our differences grow too far, they divide us in terribly hateful ways. We all live by our own innate biases.

And it goes well beyond race. We're segregated by how much money our families make or what neighborhoods we live in. We're split by when our families arrived in this country and what kind of education is available to us.

We don't all have to agree on what contributes to inequalities or how to solve them. As a journalist, I leave my personal opinion out of it. But I think it's fair to say that inequalities exist. My goal is to open windows to other perspectives of the people who live around us.

It's like this: At the end of the poverty simulation, Spaulding said the point was not to recreate real life. It was to give you a taste for what it feels like to navigate the challenges people go through for basic necessities that we often take for granted and may never have to experience.

A man in the back of the crowd asked to speak to the rest of us that day. He stood, and he implored us with gripping passion to think of this:

"These," he said, "are real people."

If you want to share with me a story about inequalities you have experienced, or if you want to tell me how you feel about what I've written, email me at stephanie.wang@indystar.com or follow me on Twitter at @stephaniewang.