The story of Freddie Gray goes a bit like this: a young, unarmed black man is arrested by police officers in a low-income neighborhood of West Baltimore, Maryland. In a video documenting the aftermath of his arrest, Gray lays on the ground in handcuffs. He is screaming and his body appears rigid. Bystanders implore police to call the paramedics, but no medical authority is contacted. Mr. Gray is yanked up by the back of his shirt collar and dragged to a police van. As he stands, he practically emanates the signs of a serious back injury. Gray reportedly loses consciousness on his ride to jail. He dies a week later of a severed spinal cord sustained during the force of his arrest.
Freddie Gray as a child. Source: “Freddie Gray’s life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks” by The Washington Post
Cue a pattern of reaction that follows almost every narrative of death by police brutality: place the late victim under a microscope and scrutinize their character until a consensus is reached that “he had it coming.” The media scoured Gray’s extensive criminal record; he had been arrested nearly twenty times over the course of his life. Details of drug-use and violence surfaced, and the public shook its collective head. But then something else happened: another layer of Gray’s personal story was uncovered by the American media. It was an account of a lawsuit settlement between the Gray family and Stanley Rochkind, their landlord of four years. Blood tests found that the Gray children, during their time of residence in Rochkind’s rental, had nearly two to three times the “acceptable” five milligram per deciliter lead concentration pronounced safe by the Centers for Disease Control. If numbers alone do not convey a clear picture of the gravity of Gray’s poisoning, Terrence McCoy of The Washington Post paints a stark portrait: “It is believed,” he writes, “that anything higher than 5 micrograms [of lead] can cripple a child’s cognitive development.” Following the severe lead exposure, Gray was diagnosed with ADHD and relegated to special education for his entire school career. He eventually dropped out before graduating high school. Then, he was murdered by law enforcement. Gray never really seemed to catch a break. So, what did the lead poisoning have to do with this?
Study after study has shown that the consequences of lead poisoning are permanent and severely debilitating, especially for the brain’s behavioral development. For people like Ruth Ann Norton of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, Gray’s early exposure to lead tells a bigger story with relevance to his troubled life: “A child who was poisoned with lead is seven times more likely to drop out of school,” Norton informs readers. Legal trouble seems to follow school truancy, as Norton explains that lead-poisoned children are also “six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system.” For those like Freddie Gray–born into poverty, poisoned by his environment, and haunted by an extensive criminal history–questions arise. Just how much does lead poisoning, a widely recognized form of environmental injustice, play a role in the long-term cycle of crime and poverty within low-income communities? How much can we blame–or excuse–victims of lead-poisoning for their behavior? Public health scholars, toxicologists, and epidemiologists have studied the life-altering behavioral impact of lead poisoning on children, especially those in low-income communities of color. Sociologists and public interest advocacy groups have broadened the conversation, establishing lead poisoning as a key component in a fierce cycle of poverty, resource deprivation, and health endangerment that is sustained across generations. While long-term solutions remain illusive, it is crucial that society comes to understand the complex web of environmental health and justice concerns that shape the lives of our most vulnerable citizens.
In order to understand the type of long-term effects lead poisoning can have on communities, we must first hone in on which populations of people are most likely to be affected. In the Harvard Environmental Law Review 2017, Emily A. Benfer, nationally-renowned health justice scholar, gives readers a glimpse into the intersections of lead poisoning, poverty, and race. First, Benfer sets out to establish a clear link between the prevalence of environmental hazards to people of low socioeconomic status. She notes that low-cost living environments such as “old, dilapidated houses” invite an onslaught of health problems from learning disabilities to cancer (503). Even in the face of evidence that environmentally hazardous environments have significant social costs, most government policy regarding lead poison prevention remains insufficient. For example, Benfer notes that an overwhelming number of government-funded housing programs are governed by a policy that addresses lead exposure only after a child has reportedly been poisoned. “The lack of primary prevention,” Benfer contends, “is especially acute in federally assisted housing” (495). In other words, for those who cannot afford viable housing on their own, the threat of lead poisoning is greater and less likely to be addressed before it is too late.
In the United States, a country with an expansive history of racial discrimination, poverty and race are closely intertwined. In her article, Benfer explains that the “Black population has the highest rate of poverty at 24.1%” (504). This statistic lies in stark contrast to the 9.1% poverty rate in the white population. If, as Benfer says, “Children living in impoverished communities have the highest prevalence of lead poisoning,” it is not hard to delineate which populations are most at risk: poor communities of color, especially poor children of color. Through her review, Dr. Emily A. Benfer sets up a critical framework for understanding the devastation lead poisoning has on vulnerable populations. Nearly all the literature on lead poisoning cast it as an environmental justice issue.
Poverty today in Johannesburg, South Africa largely attributed to the forced stratification of the Apartheid. Source: The Borgen Project
The complex issues of race and class attached to lead poisoning, however, are not unique only to the United States. A similar problem is found in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the deeply-rooted history of the Apartheid mirrors social disparity found in the United States. In a study done by faculty at the University of Witwatersrand of Johannesburg, South Africa, epidemiologist Palesa Nkomo and her colleagues sought to connect blood lead concentration to social aggression in adolescence. The study collected blood samples from nearly a thousand thirteen year olds, both girls and boys. In two years following, the participants were asked to self-report tendencies of rule-breaking, anxiety, depression, impulsivity, and overall social deviant behavior in a questionnaire. The study’s participants were Black and biracial adolescents, given that White and Indian study participants lacked sufficient lead levels to be included. While the narrow sample raises questions about the representativeness of Nkomo’s study, the results were no less interesting. “Elevated blood lead levels,” Nkomo informs readers, “were positively associated with direct aggression in mid-adolescence among Black African youth” (475) Direct aggression, as defined by the study, is the “most severe form of aggressive behavior”, and was measured in responses to survey questions such as, “I attack other people” (476). Correlating the lead concentrations in the blood samples with the self-reported survey results, she concluded that “lead exposure in early adolescence was shown to almost quadruple the risk ‘to threaten to hurt others’, during mid-adolescence” (476) If lead exposure really is such a heavy precursor to aggression and impulsivity, it might make sense as to why Freddie Gray, exposed to lead at a formative age, was no stranger to the law. A wealth of research testifies to lead’s harrowing effect on the Central Nervous System– ultimately guiding its victims to violent behavior, social impulsivity, and criminality. Nkomo’s article not only complements past scholarship, but also necessitates further focus on the relationship between possible lead exposure and criminal behavior.
If researchers like Palesa Nkomo seek to create understanding of how lead poisoning has the potential adversely affect childhood behavior, then Dr. Herbert L. Needleman, pediatrician from the University of Pittsburgh, studies the relationship between lead and antisocial behavior using a different approach. Needleman and colleagues, in “Bone Lead Levels in Adjudicated Delinquents: A Case Control Study”, measure bone lead concentrations in youth deemed delinquent by a Juvenile Court in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The team controlled for their experiment by testing and comparing their results to that of a group of non-delinquent high schoolers in the same vicinity. Similarly to Nkomo’s study of Black and mixed-race adolescents in South Africa, Dr. Needleman found that the vastly different racial compositions of the test and control group (in the delinquent section, there was roughly one White male for every four Black males. In the control section, there were two White males for every one Black male, which might raise questions of how racial variance could skew results. To address this concern, when Needleman notes that “limiting subjects to those attending the same high schools and comparing bone lead levels, we found almost identical bone lead levels” (714). To put it more simply, participants in the high school control group had largely the same, minuscule levels of lead in their bone density. The research participants deemed delinquent, however, were found to be four times more likely to have high blood lead levels than their non-delinquent counterparts. And in a surprising finding, white delinquent participants had higher bone lead levels than Black delinquent participants. While external risk factors such as race and single-parent households were found, Needleman’s research reiterates the important connection between lead exposure and criminal behavior.
In his study, instead of anticipating antisocial behavior in lead-affected children, Needleman chose participants who had already been swept up into the legal system. And, for those already entered into the legal system, it may be difficult to break out. Especially when lead exposure jeopardizes not only behavioral development, but as Needleman suggests at the end of the article, induces “impaired cognitive function and classroom performance” (715). The article concludes by warning against a relationship between educational underperformance and criminality.
In the United States, education is lauded as a foolproof tool of class mobility. So, what does education look like for lead-poisoned students? An issue brief put out by the National Center for Healthy Housing on Childhood Lead Exposure and Educational Outcomes looks to address this question from an economic perspective. In a meta-analysis of studies, The Center concludes that the United States loses around fifty-billion dollars a year to the “lost cognitive abilities” of lead-exposed students
Source: Quora.
(1), including low IQ, learning dysfunction, and educational underachievement in children. Two illustrative findings from these studies include a negative relationship between blood lead levels and the likelihood of children to be enrolled in intellectually gifted programs is in North Carolina and, in Chicago, children with the minimum “safe” blood lead level scoring significantly lower on elementary school reading and math examinations than students with lower blood levels of lead. Echoing nearly all other literature on lead exposure in children, the Center notes that these particular educational setbacks are far more likely to affect poor children of color than other communities. For many vulnerable children with high blood lead level concentrations, their exposure is a deciding factor in whether they are placed in a gifted or special education group at school. The briefing not only captures the serious cognitive damage of lead poisoning on children, but also the cyclical effect of lead poisoning and poverty in at-risk communities.
Many articles and briefings have analyzed the overarching loop of lead poisoning and poverty, but there has been a gap in sociological research to provide a broader view of the phenomenon. On an individual level, lead exposure causes aggression and social deviance. When poverty, race, and resource deprivation are tied together, true devastation lead exposure can cause is outlined. The nature of lead poisoning as a sociological setback is a critical issue that warrants more research. If lead poison as an environmental injustice issue continues to go unaddressed, the effects of lead will reach across generations and hamper the potential of our future. People’s lives will be damned to violence and aggression before they were even given a chance, much like Freddie Gray.
Source: BBC
Paul B. Stretesky and Michael J. Lynch, two criminology researchers from Colorado State University and the University of Southern Florida, have begun to delve into the sociological perspective on lead poisoning and its social effects. In 2004, the two published “The Relationship between Lead and Crime,” an article that explores the social triangle of resource deprivation, lead poisoning, and poverty. Stretesky and Lynch offer examples of resource deprivation in lead poisoning, such as “fewer contacts with physicians,” and “inadequate and incomplete treatment” (214). People with insufficient resources, the authors say, are more likely to live closer to environmental hazards. Thus, they are more likely to be poisoned. With a lack of resources, the particular communities of people (usually poor and non-White) susceptible to lead poisoning cannot afford adequate treatment. The lead poisoning, unremedied, has greater potential to cause antisocial behavior and criminality–the trend both Needleman and Nkomo found in their research. Stretesky and Lynch used three sets of data to analyze the relationship between poverty, lead exposure, and crime in counties across the United States. Their findings supported the argument that resource deprivation intensifies the relationship between lead poisoning and poverty, insinuating a sociological cycle in which lead poisoning indirectly causes and results from being poor. In discussing the implications of their research, Stretesky and Lynch note that “Both race and income are part of the deprivation factor” (222).
Source: Luxury Simplified Blog
The slow poisoning of vulnerable communities is inevitably present in Charleston, where there is major economic stratification rooted in the city’s dark racist past. Charleston comprises neighborhoods diverse in race and socioeconomic status. Parts of Charleston feature million dollar row houses listed on the city’s national registry of historic sites. By contrast, the homes east of Meeting Street in Charleston are located in what people refer to as the “Eastside Community.” Eastside is a historically Black neighborhood, where I live as a college student who cannot afford to live in a location in central downtown. The neighborhood is alive with culture, rich in history, but low in income. The streets are lined with trash and unidentifiable gunk. Houses are falling apart. In the absence of data, one could expect that air-lead and water-lead levels in the Eastside community will be significantly higher than the wealthier, predominantly White neighborhoods in Charleston. A safe environment clean of toxins is a fundamental human right, and every community– even Charleston’s Eastside– has the right to live free of devastation from lead exposure.
Works Cited
Benfer, Emily A. “Contaminated Childhood: How the United States Failed to Prevent the Chronic Lead Poisoning of Low-Income Children and Communities of Color.” Harvard Environmental Law Review, vol. 41, no. 2, July 2017, p. 493. EBSCOhost, nuncio.cofc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edb&AN=124742152&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Marbella, Jean. “Beginning of Freddie Grays life as sad as its end, court case shows.” Baltimoresun.com, 29 Apr. 2015, www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-freddie-gray-lead-paint-20150423-story.html.
McCoy, Terrence. “Freddie Grays life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 29 Apr. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/local/freddie-grays-life-a-study-in-the-sad-effects-of-lead-paint-on-poor-blacks/2015/04/29/0be898e6-eea8-11e4-8abc-d6aa3bad79dd_story.html?utm_term=.b42c6100ebfd.
National Center for Healthy Housing. “Issue Brief: Childhood Lead Exposure and Educational Outcomes.” Int J Child Health Hum Dev. 2010;3(1):77–84.
Needleman, Herbert L, et al. “Bone Lead Levels in Adjudicated Delinquents. A Case Control Study.” Neurotoxicology and Teratology, vol. 24, no. 6, Nov. 2002, pp. 711-717. EBSCOhost, nuncio.cofc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mnh&AN=12460653&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Nkomo, Palesa, et al. “The Association between Environmental Lead Exposure with Aggressive Behavior, and Dimensionality of Direct and Indirect Aggression during Mid-Adolescence: Birth to Twenty Plus Cohort.” Science of the Total Environment, vol. 612, 15 Jan. 2018, pp. 472-479. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.08.138.
Stretesky, Paul B and Michael J Lynch. “The Relationship between Lead and Crime.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 45, no. 2, June 2004, pp. 214-229. EBSCOhost, nuncio.cofc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mnh&AN=15305761&site=eds-live&scope=site.
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