Chapter 6: Battling Before Birth: Institutionalized Barriers to the Health and Well-Being of African American Children

If any group epitomizes suffering, vulnerability, and a lack of choice, it is poor children. While all babies are at the mercy of adults for their care, children of poverty are in particular need of insulators from the variables that hinder health, learning capacity, and school achievement because their caretakers do not command the resources to protect them. As a result, impoverished youngsters are more apt to be born underweight, be malnourished, and susceptible to disease and to environmental toxins. The implications of these poverty markers do not disappear after birth or early childhood, but rather persist into adulthood.

It seems inconceivable that some children in the United States battle hunger and health deterioration at rates more akin to children in developing nations. However, the inconceivable is a reality for poor African American children. On virtually every indices of health, the gap between African Americans and Whites has prevailed or widened over the last 20 years. As a result of the complex interaction between health, poverty and education, the paramount question for many low-income African American babies is whether they will survive to adulthood (Harper & Marcus, 1999).