Day 2: Environment

"We Don't Care" by Kanye West

...drug dealer buy Jordans / crackhead buy crack / and the White man gets paid off of alla dat...

Happy 2nd day of Black History Month.

Sticking with the theme of "the kids", I would like to speak about environment.

The conversation about nature versus nurture seeks to address which facet has more of an imprint on the way a person develops and ultimately behaves.

Are people born with the behaviors, tendencies, habits, etc. that they conduct?  Or does the environment (people, punishment, personal experience) create the behaviors, tendencies, and habits a person demonstrates?

In the age of advance science and research, most people agree that some of our behaviors and characteristics are intrinsic and some are shaped by the environment a person finds themselves.

Language is a good example of the interaction between nature and nurture.  In humans, language is acquired so fast, that linguistics and other researchers hypothesize that the human brain is wired for language and that there is a language acquisition device (LAD) in the brain.

Infant children who are pre-verbal are able to recognize the syllabic boundaries (when a syllable ends and when a syllable begins) of any language, suggesting that the human brain already has a system ready to accept the acquisition of language if exposed.

This is where the nurture part is introduced.  The child has to be exposed to a language to acquire it.  The child has to interact with other verbal human beings in order to finesse the processing and expression of language.

In studies conducted on toddlers, socioeconomic status strongly influences the level of verbal ability of the child.  Children of high socioeconomic status tend to be exposed to more words and have larger vocabularies than children of low socioeconomic status by the age of 4.

This goes to say that all the children exposed to language (barring cognitive difficulties) do learn language.  But the level of aptitude in language is dependent upon exposure.

In my opinion, low socioeconomic status in code for colored people.  I don't mean to say that there are no poor White people.  However, race and socioeconomic status seem to converse frequently and people of color are disproportionately poor.

Poverty (you again) interrupts the potential for successful development afforded by biological devices.  The children are not exposed to appropriate language and therefore do not acquire it.

When does this end?  I ask again, what do we accomplish by blaming the poor for being poor other than keeping their children poor so we can blame them for being poor adults?

Children of poverty who are unable to disengage from the tantrums of being poor are surrounded by children and families just like their own.  They do not have examples of how to live differently.  Those things that surround you are those things you believe are possible, attainable.

So if everyone a person knows doesn't completes anything higher than high school, never travels, lives in the same neighborhood for most of their lives, is never really financially successful, what standard of living do you expect them to adopt?

However, this is a conversation about nature versus nurture.  Even if you are surrounded by a lackluster environment, you have some personal accountability.  I do not say that such environments give you the excuse to never accomplish anything.  I suggest, however, that it makes sense when a person falls into this lower standard of living when that is all they know, for a poor diet does not nourish the body.