Gifted Children and Adults Can Slip Through the Cracks: Racism, Poverty, and Families’ Mental Health Matter

After you read the set-up for the article, I present my disturbing experience at my alma mater’s high school football game hosted by the “home team,” an inner-city school with high poverty levels. It’s taken me nearly a year to find the emotional strength to write about it.

In too many schools and school districts, youngsters are kept behind by poverty and lack of access to what they need in order to learn and otherwise thrive. This is particularly true when race enters the picture. When I worked as a gifted consultant, I rarely had African American clients. The schools in my area are highly segregated by both poverty, race and districts lines. After all, our systems are largely set up based on real estate and what you can afford for housing. Racism has kept many, many people down.

And yet, race, I’ve learned over the years, is a social rather than biological construct. The vast majority of mainstream scientists agree with this and point out that when the human genome project was completed in 2003, it showed that race is not a biological construct — all human beings share more than 99% of the same genes — it is a social construct.[1] And it is destructive. And it leaves too many people out of showing their gifts, their talents. It isn’t…