Lead as pharmakon: IQ, violence, and the racialization of a toxic element

By tracking lead toxicology and politics from the United States to Peru, this article shows how contemporary discourses of human lead exposure have become complexly racialized. Despite its nearly global ban from gasoline and paint, lead poisoning remains a systemic health problem in marginalized communities throughout the world. Viewed as a “social pharmakon,” lead's ongoing “cures” outweigh current social valuations of its systemic physiological harm in racially devalued communities. While scientific research linking lead to decreased IQ and increased violent behavior has attempted to animate broader public interest in the inequitable spread of lead exposure, it does so by reanimating racist tropes of biogeographic inferiority. Rather than dehumanizing lead-exposed individuals and communities, narratives of lead intoxication must integrate its immediate social and material harms in specific locales and as a symptom of systemic racial injustice at a global scale.