Poverty, intelligence and life in the inner city.

Abstract

There is now ample documentary evidence to show that poverty—and the physical, intellectual, and emotional deprivations that go with it—can be a direct cause of mental retardation. The poor of all races are affected and—in absolute numbers—there are more whites than Negroes who suffer from it. I am, however, particularly interested in this subject because the Negro poor are victimized by this alarming situation more than others, since, in relative numbers, there are far more poor Negroes than poor whites. Too many children, and all too frequently, Negro children, thus pay a heavy price for the injustices of our society. We know today that only a few among all those who are mentally retarded suffer from an obvious organic defect with genetic cause. Genetic defects affect all levels of society in the same way, whether those afflicted are rich or poor, white or Negro. But it is quite different when damage to the brain is due not to a genetic cause but to disease before or after birth, or else to accident, infection, or poisoning. The poor, whether they are white or Negro, are more often its victims. And the mentally retarded who do not show any organic brain damage—those who are only functionally retarded—come predominantly from the poorer sections of our society. Functional retardation is very rare among those with high incomes and among well educated segments of the community. But it is very common—it can be detected in as many as 15 percent of all children—in deprived rural areas and in the chaos of the inner cities. This is now so well accepted that we have given the name of ‘‘socio-environmental retardation’’ to this kind of functional retardation prevalent among the deprived. More than half of all mentally retarded people fall into this last category. What in fact are the environmental factors in the life of the poor that stunt their intellectual development? To begin with, we are now convinced that intelligence itself is largely controlled by the kind of diet a child receives. Evidence was presented at a recent International conference that malnutrition in the first three years of life may permanently impair intelligence and it has been estimated that more than half of the 90 million babies born each year may run a risk of permanent retardation resulting from malnutrition. Moreover, experiments with several kinds of laboratory animals suggest that malnutrition at certain critical times EDITOR’S NOTE: The Whitney M. Young article was based on a presentation at the national AAMD conference in 1968 and published later in volume 7 of Mental Retardation. At the end of the decade of the 1960s the Civil Rights Movement had statutorily established equal rights and access but the dayto-day reality of the nation was a ‘‘de facto’’ segregation based on race, poverty, and privilege. Young was a social worker and civil rights activist in the 1950s, and prior to assuming the Executive Director of the Urban League, the Dean of the School of Social Work at Atlanta University. Under his leadership and vision, the Urban League moved from an organization focused on social welfare to a force for social justice. When ‘‘Poverty, intelligence and life in the inner city’’ was published, IDD was largely framed by the field in terms of the challenges of service and care, while notions of civil or even human rights were only just beginning to establish a toehold. In my earlier commentary I referred to Young’s article as ‘‘prescient.’’ In this paper, the issue of bias and overrepresentation of IDD among African Americans is the ostensible focus. But the themes addressed by Young go well beyond notions of cultural bias and engage questions about risk that is embedded in social, cultural, and economic inequities. These themes were not necessarily new in 1969 but they remain as relevant now as then. Over this past half century, the IDD field has visited and re-visited this intersection of race and poverty. And you will note their relevance throughout the goals generated across the 10 working groups of the National Goals meeting. While I implied in my commentary that Young’s appeal to the ‘‘elite of our citizenry’’ for solutions was something of a relic from another era, his call for the direct engagement of the disability field in the broader debate on income inequality still rings true.