Producing Racialized Risk: Scientific Discourse on Lead Poisoning, 1849-1978

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: Medical Experiences

Abstract

Lead poisoning, a racially disparate toxic exposure, is an exemplar of contemporary environmental racism and has been problematized by researchers accordingly. Governmentally, primary prevention – preemptively removing lead from the built environment – has largely been eschewed in favor of testing “high risk” children for exposure. Historical accounts often frame this regulatory shortcoming as a legacy of racialized portrayals of lead poisoning by industry-affiliated researchers in the 20th century, who framed poisonings as the fault of dysfunctional Black families. These accounts, however, do not interrogate how even lead-critical researchers produced notions of risk as endemic to pathologized, racialized communities.

To address this, I explore the conceptualization of the risk of lead poisoning in American scientific discourse from 1849-1978. Through a discourse analysis of 110 scientific publications, I find researchers conceptualized the risk of – and responsibility for – lead poisoning according to the racialized bodies, behaviors, and communities of the exposed. I argue this racialization shapes contemporary perspectives on the consequences of exposure, which now emphasize “biosocial” outcomes, and enables the persistence of lead poisoning in the U.S. This racialized framing of lead exposure may revitalize and naturalize notions of Black biological difference and pathology, despite lead’s status as a modifiable environmental exposure.

Author

• Margaret Schmits-Earley, University of Wisconsin-Madison