Finally, amid a culture grounded in values of competition and materialism, we confront not only actual material conditions, pertinent as they are, but also how people are induced to see themselves. When people judge themselves or are judged by others according to financial achievement, being lower on the pyramid-even if in a relatively stable position-is itself a source of stress that undermines well-being. In the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky's tart phrase, "Health is particularly corroded by your nose constantly being rubbed in what you do not have."
Racism, poverty, inequality-in this society, people's faces are constantly rubbed in what they do not have and what the system daily reminds them they do not deserve.
In 1974 the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, cited earlier in this book, coined the phrase "sociogenic brain damage." Technologies since available to us confirm that stressed environments, including penury, do interfere with brain development. More recently, one scientist has called poverty a "neurotoxin." Brain scans of children and young people from deprived backgrounds have shown reduced surface area of the cerebral cortex, as well as smaller hippocampi and amygdalae-the subcortical regions involved in memory formation and emotional processing. The brain's serotonin system in adolescents has been seen to be impaired by the stresses of poverty, increasing the risk for emotional turbulence.
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Both inequality and poverty stir the by now familiar brew of disturbed genetic function, inflammation, chromosomal and cellular aging, physiological wear and tear, hormonal disturbances, cardiovascular effects, and immune debility, all of which combine to bring illness, disability, and death. Biologically embedded in utero, in childhood, and throughout adolescence, all these are further exacerbated by adversity or threat at any stage of life. Stress hormone levels, for example, are much higher among children of low economic status -a biological hazard for future illness of many kinds.
... a four-year-old First Nations child, Carlene, had a pin stuck in her tongue on her first day at a federally mandated, church-run residential school not far from where I lived. Her crime had been to speak her Native language in the classroom. For an hour this little girl could not put her tongue back in her mouth for fear of cutting her lips. Soon after, years of sexual abuse began. By age nine Carlene was an alcoholic and later became dependent on opiates to soothe her pain. We met at a healing ceremony not long ago and that was when, sobbing and trembling with emotion, she told me her story. I thought I had heard everything. I had not. Now a grandmother and years sober, she grieves to see her grandchildren suffer the throes of addiction.
As the Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates tersely asserts, very concept of race emerges from the distorted imagination of "Race is the child of racism, not the father." In other words, the very concept of race emerges from the distorted imagination of the racist. Though racism's impacts are real, in physiological or genetic terms race does not exist. Superficial differences in skin color, body morphology, or facial features do not create "races.” Historically the idea of race arose from the impulse of European capitalism to enrich itself by subjugating, enslaving, and, if necessary, destroying Indigenous people on other continents, from Africa to Australia to North America. Indeed, the word "race" did not exist in any meaningful way until it was created in the late eighteenth century. Psychologically, on the individual level, the "othering" racism entails is an antidote to self-doubt: if I don't feel good about myself, at least I can feel superior to somebody and gain a sense of power and status by claiming privilege over them.
It was in the year 1800 that the great German naturalist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt first sounded the alarm about the impact of human activity on the climate, having seen the environmental damage wreaked by colonial plantations in Venezuela. He prophesized that our interference with the ecology could have "unforeseeable impact on future generations".