I’ve read in multiple places that “lead poisoning” is a farce designed to explain away low IQ scores of ghetto people immediately after the implementation of the Great Society.
The reasoning was that with the Great Society IQs in the ghetto would of course rise dramatically, and when that did not happen, the left settled upon “eating paint” as an excuse for failure.
The correlation between lead and IQ has been looked at from a couple of different angles, and there does seem to be a correlation. It’s not large, granted, and there’s a greater correlation between lead and violent criminals than IQ, but IQ does seem to be affected by the amount of lead in the environment.
Certainly, I don’t think it reasonable to expect dramatic increases, since lead only really hit hard in the 50s and 60s, and tapered off in the 70s with the elimination of leaded gas. The Bell Curve pretty clearly shows that the black IQ curve is substantially to the left of other ethnicities, and so even removing lead isn’t going to fix that, but I think it’s fair to say that lead is going to have an impact on cognition; any amount of lead above the minimum at which it can have a biological effect is going to be deleterious. It’s also pretty clear that lead pollution was more concentrated in inner cities in the 50s-70s where blacks were most populous, so there would be a greater number of blacks impacted by lead-related issues.
I don’t say this to excuse blacks, but I’m pretty confident that environmental lead had an effect on blacks.
Plus, my comment was sarcasm anyway, so it supports your posit about the Left and their “eating paint chips” meme.
It’s manganese I tell ya! And sleeping pills!
THIS is the guy that Prince told Tavis Smiley inspired him to write “Dreamer”. You can hear TS tell this kook Gregory not to lose his microphone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnM2X9yGP4
When someone tells you how much they think Prince was a genius, show them his hero right here.