How do you know that's not Jesus?

In my Master of Social Work program, I am taking a social justice class. In one assignment, I needed to write about a social disparity that I have noticed, unfair treatment, prejudices. I feel quite strongly about this, not only as a social worker but also as someone who is affected by these prejudices.
The best way to explain this unfair treatment is in a story. One of my clients, a homeless man, was taken to the hospital one morning. Sometime in the early afternoon, after a group of medical students conferred in a corner of his room, one of them approached my client and asked, “Have you eaten out of the garbage today?” Outraged, my client cried, “No! Have YOU eaten out of the garbage today?” He felt hurt, belittled and dehumanized. While, for some of my clients, this is a perectly ligitimate question, it was posed very disrespectfully.
The issue that I mean to relate with this story is the way that homeless and low-income people are mistreated. Homeless people are prescribed as not hard workers and even as “sub-human,” as uncaring about themselves or others. The fact is there may be a variety of reasons for this presumed “laziness,” reasons over which the individual has no control. While there is a minority of homeless people who do not care, who are lazy or who do not work hard, this does not reflect the majority. The evaluation of the whole is based upon the actions of a few.
A result is that the onus of responsibility is on homeless people for their predicament. It “blames the victim.” It takes attention away from true culprits of homelessness such as lack of affordable housing, outrageous health care costs, and lack of a living wage, to name a few factors, and places it on the individual.
An interesting thing to note about this judgment is that even those who help this population are vulnerable to it – people like me! In my agency, my department is the only one that works with homeless clients on a continual day to day basis. We are the most isolated in the agency, the expectations for us are higher than for the rest of the agency, and when discussing agency policy or change, we are the least counted. It is almost as though those of us who work with this “dirty” population are considered “dirty” by association.
My reaction to this begins with understanding. When I first began working with the homeless population six years ago, I was quite nervous. I have never lived on the streets and I was not at all familiar with the homeless population. To me, they were scary and dangerous, an unknown element. My friends and family were frightened for me as well. After several weeks of working with them, however, I got over that and I came to respect them very much. Given the nature of the lives of the homeless, they are a very difficult population to get to know. Therefore, I can fully understand how people have misconceptions about them. They simply do not know.
What I cannot understand, however, is how people who DO come into contact with them, and still act out of ignorance towards them. I have very little patience with that.
I posted this, dear reader, because this is something that I clearly feel a passion for and wanted to comment on. There is no reason or excuse for the kind of treatment that homeless people get.