Today’s post is the first in a series of two by guest author Deborah Belle.
On September 1, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, saying how pleased he was to take “a brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of good will…”
King credited psychology for the word “maladjusted,” noting that “destructive maladjustment should be destroyed and… all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.” But, King argued, “I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.”
We have known for many years that in wealthy nations like ours, poor people experience more physical and emotional illness than non-impoverished people, and die at a younger age. This is hardly surprising, given the many risk factors associated with poverty—substandard housing and malnutrition, environmental toxins and pollutants, noise and crowding, violence and the threat of violence, and poor access to health care.
But the poverty—illness connection has other sources as well. Human beings respond to threat by mobilizing physiologically. Stress hormones course through our bodies. Our heart rate increases as our bodies prepare for fight or flight. When the threat has passed, our bodies return to their previous unstressed calm. However, when threat is chronic, as it often is for poor adults and children, levels of stress hormones remain chronically elevated, and there is no return to a healthy state of calmness.
Given the grim risks associated with poverty, it is distressing to realize that the child poverty rate in this country today is substantially higher than when Dr. King died. In 1969, 14% of children under 18 were poor. Today, 22% of all U.S. children live in poverty. And poverty remains racialized. More than one in three Black or Hispanic children now live in poverty, compared to one in eight White, non-Hispanic children.
Our country is alone among industrialized nations in having child poverty rates of this magnitude. We also have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country. The richest 1 percent of the U.S. population owns 40 percent of all wealth, and most of this wealth is concentrated among the top one tenth of one percent. As Rebecca Solnit observed in Harper’s magazine, “Society has been divided into a desperate majority and an obscene minority that hoards wealth so colossal it’s meaningless.”
Deborah Belle is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Her research focuses on the impact of poverty and inequality on individual mental health and family functioning, the ways adults and children make sense of poverty, wealth, and economic inequality, and the stresses that arise at the intersection of paid employment and family life. She is also interested in gender differences in social behavior and teaches courses on social psychology, the psychology of women, and the psychology of families. Her posts are excerpts from a speech given at Boston University January 19, 2015.
