Which argument is more stigmatizing: that people’s poor decisions make them poor, or that poverty causes people to make bad decisions?

In 2004, Bill Cosby inferred the former in his controversial address to Howard University on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. Branded the “Ghettoesburg Address”, some interpreted Cosby’s speech as a harsh indictment of blacks for shunning their responsibility to educate their children. Citing a fifty-percent high school drop-out rate among black teenagers, Cosby claimed that “lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” and that “Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem.”

Bill Cosby. People still talk about the “Ghettoesburg Address”.

Although Dr. Cosby’s speech was moving in its demand for a renewal of self-respect in the black community, some feared that his words could easily be misused by those who wish to believe that racism is obsolete, and that poor non-whites don’t need help from the more privileged. don’t they?

Penn’s very own Dr. Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has been studying the effect of socioeconomic status on the developmental capability of the brain. This week, the Times of London reported Dr. Farah’s findings, which indicate that “a deprived childhood may affect the physical development of the brain and render its owner less intellectually capable.”

This finding could elicit two responses: either it will draw attention to the need to radically tackle poverty–especially child poverty–or it will become a documented, credible reason to disenfranchise underprivileged adults. Now society will have a recusal for its guilt: poor people are dumb; it’s not our fault they can’t be employed! Both responses are possible. In a likely scenario, children will benefit from Farah’s analysis, while teenagers and adults will be seriously gypped.

The Times continues: “If poverty wrecks the brain, then it is plausible that, generally, poor people make ‘worse’ decisions than rich people. And if they do, do they bear the same level of responsibility for their actions?”

We love responsibility–we don’t like taking it, but we like assigning it, in which case it is called blame. The argument that low socioeconomic status causes intellectual impairment might assign responsibility in a good way, or in a bad way. Will the obligation to fix this problem be assigned to society, or will blame be placed on the poor (you grew up poor, you are mentally inferior, we can’t do anything about it now)?

One of the most quoted barbs of Cosby’s speech is “$500 sneakers, for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.” Could findings like those of Farah show that it isn’t a person’s fault to choose sneakers over scholarship, because poverty has rendered him intellectually unable to make a smart choice? Depending on how the mainstream interprets it, Farah’s argument could actually reduce the stigma attached to poverty.

Yet, no good deed can go unpunished, and no scientific discovery can go unhijacked. Just as people feared that conservatives would twist Bill Cosby’s speech to absolve society of responsibility, Farah’s work on the intellectual impact of socioeconomic status could be distorted to allow for abandoning poor adults as a lost cause.

It depends on where it’s most comfortable for us to place the blame.

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