[...]Poverty and the Brain: Becoming Critical « Neuroanthropology[...]…

Perhaps a first step in creating a policy on poverty is to educate the public on the importance of environmental input early in life upon later development of the human brain. Most families will work to follow such educational guidelines if they understand what to do with regard to promoting brain health for their own children. For those who are vulnerable and without resources or adults to provide the enriched environment policies can address what is needed and appropriate resources to help developing children thrive.

Thank you for referencing my post on Racewire in your comment on poverty and the brain. Since our blog is mostly about race and politics, it’s neat to be cited on an academic blog (albeit a decidedly undorky one). I’m not surprised, but I’m glad to see that people in the scientific field understand the perils of oversimplifying (or perhaps, overcomplicating, depending on how you look at it) systemic social problems by ascribing them to some kind of “natural” phenomenon–and all the accompanying subtexts of biological determinism, or even social darwinism. From a racial equity standpoint, it seems there’s always a tension between stressing concrete evidence of discrimination (like the poverty-stress link), and avoiding a myopic focus that obscures individual agency and invites defeatism.

On the opposition, of course, as both of our posts pointed out, reactionary forces relish this kind of science for two reasons: sometimes it encourages the “naturalization” of certain social inequalities. And in the realm of politics, scientific theories applied to social injustices can be glibly flipped to imply group inferiority and , at the same time, to feign respect for individuality. Patterns of underachievement become individual failure on a massive scale, and structural arguments are reduced to reverse discrimination and self-pity.

Anyway, don’t mean to rant, but I just wanted to thank you for helping elevate this discussion in circles that tend to take an antiseptic approach to social ills.

Here’s one of his main points: “Generic statements like “the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children” seem to be general statements about the properties of groups, but in fact they’re not. Rather, they’re statements about the distribution of properties of the individuals making up the groups. And they’re effectively meaningless if they don’t tell us anything about how much the distributions overlap.”