"Person in a street situation" or "beggar"? When language becomes a battlefield

This May, Antonio Prata, a Folha de S. Paulo columnist whom I follow and admire, brought up a thought-provoking debate in an article entitled ''Person in beggar's situation'' ¹. In it, Prata expressed his absolute disapproval of the term "person in a street situation".

In his opinion, this expression, which he "hates", would represent an "aberration of political correctness". In his view, "the phrase" (sic) in its "semantic asepsis" propagates a lie:

"It's as if the guy who's sleeping on the pavement, on top of an open cardboard box, covered with that blanket from protecting moving furniture, with an (empty) bottle of cachaça next to him, who hasn't showered for weeks, with no social or family ties, maybe addicted to crack, in short, it's as if this screwed-up person is in a momentary 'situation' that will soon be resolved."

And he continues his verbal barrage without shying away from, in his opinion, giving the correct name to that person in such a condition.

Beggar is the name of this person. (...) Any linguistic corruption to make up for his condition only serves to assuage our guilt. It's sleazy behavior; a cowardly gesture. Instead of trying to save the person from total degradation, we pretend that they're not that bad off.

In essence, this would be the argument of his first article on the subject, permeated with a lot of irony and debauchery, with the verve that characterizes him and that we have learned to love.

I confess that I had never thought about this semantic issue. I've always found the word "beggar" extremely derogatory, even though, agreeing with Prata, it would perhaps best define the condition of that person.

About a fortnight later, Prata returned to the pages of Folha with an article entitled Open response to the open letter ². In it, he reports that his personal friend, former senator and current state deputy Eduardo Suplicy, had reposted a message from the São Paulo City Forum in Defence of the Homeless on his Instagram account. Calming down, Prata praises the courteous tone of the communiqué, "the aim of which was to put forward arguments, not to go for the kick in the nuts and finger in the eye that are the norm today on social networks".

In its argument on the Instagram post, the forum emphasises that "labels such as 'beggar' and 'pedlar' refer to the idea of people associated with begging, vagrancy and delinquency, and who would not be deserving of adequate public policies".

The forum continues:

"The term 'street situation' is essential for the dignified treatment of these people, who are not fated to be 'beggars', as the stigma of the word imposes."

And concludes the forum note:

"Talking about people in a street situation is defending citizenship and the rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution."

In his response to the second article, Prata recognizes the possibility of changing phrases and terminology to reduce the stigma that certain words can attach to this or that individual, but he fears that these new expressions will widen the already abyssal gulf between left and right.

The problem is that this rebranding of the world is creating a kind of patois [dialect] only spoken by the left, a dialect that distances us from the majority of the population, precisely those people we have to win over so that we don't fall back into the hands of the extreme right.

With the opportunity provided by the Forum's open letter to Antonio Prata, the latter was able to express his point of view on the issue more clearly. In fact, it is clear that his central target is the hypertrophy of political correctness in national political life.

In this debate, I think they're both right. Prata's concern about worsening ideological polarisation with the growing adoption of political correctness in our daily lives is legitimate. But, on the other hand, the concern of the São Paulo City Forum in Defence of the Population in a Street Situation to change the vocabulary in order to reinscribe these already vulnerable people within the scope of constitutional rights is pertinent.

Richard Rorty and the critique of political correctness

I see affinities between Prata's argument and the thought of the American philosopher Richard Rorty, especially what he expressed in Achieving our country: Leftist thought in twentieth-century America ³ (1998).

For Rorty, the intellectuals of the US academic left, from the 1960s onwards, abandoned the politics of concrete institutional transformation and began to focus on cultural discourses and symbolic denunciations, thus distancing themselves from the popular classes, who were incapable of following such discourses. This was the birth of "political correctness".

In his view, this distances intellectuals from the working public, creating a moralising and exclusionary language that reinforces resentment rather than generating alliances, and which is absolutely unintelligible to the working classes.

A corollary of such a state of affairs, in Rorty's view, with the distancing of the academic left from the working class, would be the rise of authoritarian and resentful populists. Some see his analysis as premonitory of the rise of Trump, and of authoritarian populists further down the Equator. An example of this would be Brazil, but I won't go into more detail.

In Rorty's view, the political correctness that Prata now denounces would represent a shift from a transformative left to a performative left, centred on language, ways of speaking (like "people in street situation") and identities.

Transposing this to Brazil, while the "old left" fought for the minimum wage, social security, labour and land reform, the "new left", which emerged in the 1990s, concentrated its political capital on legal and symbolic aspects, such as the use of impartial language, symbolic quotas in public tenders, laws against discrimination and media exposure.

Even while maintaining structural agendas, a significant portion of the left began to give more importance to discourse than to actually changing institutions. Perhaps this is why the progress made with the National Policy for the People in a Street Situation, established by Decree 7,053 of 23 December 2009, has been meagre, as the 2023 National Plan for Visible Streets admits.

And therein lies the strategic error for Rorty (and perhaps Prata): social justice requires structural reforms, not semantic purification - and such structural reforms require majority building, coalition building and a country project. Without this, the left becomes an academic or militant niche, opening up a dangerous flank for the rise of messianic far-right leaders with their easy promises.

We must recognise that, in Brazil, a former president channelled the feelings of symbolic exclusion of parts of the population who felt ridiculed, censored or ignored by a linguistically progressive elite. This elite spoke a language that they didn't understand (political correctness) and which seemed to assign them an inescapable and unpayable historical guilt and debt.

In conclusion, let the obsessive fixation on vocabulary and semantic reforms not blind us to the need for structural and basic reforms to reverse the scandalous situation of this disinherited, now known as the "population in street situation".

1. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/antonioprata/2025/05/pessoa-em-situacao-de-mendigo.shtml?pwgt=lcu1eebb7yw0bsub9395p2dso7mfcghon1zstl2fp3wxudqa&utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=compwagift[↩]
2. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/antonioprata/2025/05/resposta-aberta-a-carta-aberta.shtml?pwgt=lcu1eedqqrk4o5l3st6e4m7xvg5ffjplm3jyduyc91jd7y82&utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=compwagift[↩]
3. https://www.amazon.com.br/Achieving-Our-Country-Leftist-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674003128/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=33OD3Z1OYZPGR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.PnErUpks5e5RK_6BC2WDtnn4Q0kFXptT9s9tnlkJK3UXx0TJhWfhHrXGCtevRRqYfnRhCGQ6pZk8zHIGybgKwiffHj-HRxpS0oMpuZDCfxI.X1jOmLtDhvpeMZLYGchGoSzUUHxySvr_5tfsj62xwVg&dib_tag=se&keywords=achieving+our+country&qid=1747759080&sprefix=achieving+our+country%2Caps%2C249&sr=8-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.6d798eae-cadf-45de-946a-f477d47705b9[↩]

Cláudio Cordovil is a journalist and public health researcher with a career marked by active listening and a commitment to social rights. He worked for decades in the mainstream press and today investigates structural inequalities, focusing on marginalised populations such as people living with rare diseases. He has been a civil servant at Fiocruz since 2015. He is the editor of the newsletter "Bioethics for All People" and creator of the blog "Academia de Pacientes". In Solidaritas, Cláudio writes about those who live on the margins but deserve to be at the centre of public policies. He seeks to expose the gears of urban exclusion with a journalistic eye and social listening. He believes that information is shelter and words are a tool for justice. He has a PhD in Communication and Culture. He lives in Rio de Janeiro, but writes with his feet on the street.

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