The mythical “ghetto” lead paint chip eater helped automakers hide its complicity with the harm of its leaded gas
Car culture actively distorted the lead-crime crisis theory demonstrated by Nevin in 2000 and further supported by Masters in 2003. The automobile industry leveraged racist narratives of intellectually deficient parenting to deflect blame for the significant harm lead exposure caused to young children.
“The Lead Industries Association was able to manipulate the perception of lead poisoning was that they defined it as a problem of what they called slums. That is, inner cities where the housing was deteriorating and primarily children of color were being exposed to flaking lead off of the walls and ceilings.” —Gerald Markowitz, history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY in a 2022 interview in Noise Omaha.
A peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research (Nevins, 2000) revealed a strong link between childhood lead exposure and violent crime rates. Researchers found that variations in gasoline lead exposure from 1941 to 1986 accounted for 90 percent of the fluctuation in violent crime rates from 1960 to 1998. Similarly, differences in childhood paint lead exposure from 1879 to 1940 explained 70 percent of the variation in murder rates from 1900 to 1960. These findings highlight the long-term societal impacts of environmental lead exposure and moved the lead-crime hypothesis to theory.
In the lead-crime theory, the culprit that is often pointed to is lead paint in homes, even more so than lead pipes. There was a great deal of lead in homes, according to the EPA 87 percent of homes built before 1940 have some lead-based paint, 24 percent of homes built between 1960 and 1978 have some lead-based paint. However, the greater villain was masked by the focus on household lead. Many U.S. children were exposed to high quantities of leaded gasoline, especially in urbanized cities (by 1980, cities like Montclair and Bloomfield New Jersey were urbanized cities).
Eating a paint chips was NOT the main vector of transmission
In a 2022 peer reviewed study conducted by researchers from Florida State University and Duke University and edited by Pricenton’s Douglas Massey found that childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million IQ points, or 2.6 points per person on average.
For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption skyrocketed, loss was estimated to be up to 6 points.
Exposure to it came primarily from inhaling auto exhaust.
As a child in Los Angeles I remember briefly that there was a choice between leaded and unleaded gasoline. Growing up in the U.S. you didn’t have to eat paint chips to be exposed to lead, you simply had to go outside. Despite many stories to the contrary I do not remember a proliferation of paint chip eating by myself nor my friends as a child and I grew up in a hypersegregated Los Angeles neighborhood. But I do remember smelling exhaust fumes. The lead-crime theory often omits gasoline, which remains a scary villain in groups with peers born at the end of the 20th century.
It does not just end with the air in regards to auto emissions.
Leaded gasoline leaks from out of commission gas stations can directly contaminate groundwater and Superfund sites include many such stations.
It also impacts the soil. From the study Getting the Lead Out:
“Soil studies in Baltimore, Maryland, beginning in the mid-1970s, indicated that lead particles exhausted from vehicles fueled by leaded gasoline excessively contaminated urban soils compared with non-urban soils.”
What is lead?
Lead is the final state of decay for many radioactive elements. The result is that it is one of the most common heavy metals on planet earth. Lead is the most prevalent element above an atomic number of 40 and is the 36th most abundant element on the planet.
From the Britannica: Lead is formed both by neutron-absorption processes and the decay of radionuclides of heavier elements. Lead has four stable isotopes; their relative abundances are lead-204, 1.48 percent; lead-206, 23.6 percent; lead-207, 22.6 percent; and lead-208, 52.3 percent. Three stable lead nuclides are the end products of radioactive decay in the three natural decay series: uranium (decays to lead-206), thorium (decays to lead-208), and actinium (decays to lead-207).
Lead Exposure and Crime: A Delayed Connection
In a study by Rogers (2003), he pointed out that while direct correlation between annual sales of leaded gasoline and violent crime rates appears minimal, the relationship becomes striking with a 17-year time lag. It reaches a correlation of over 0.90. It implies that exposure to lead fumes before birth (fetal) or early childhood stages—long before individuals typically engage in violent crime—plays a significant role. The findings point to lead exposure as an ignored factor in violent crime trends and suggest that the Congressional ban on leaded gasoline contributed to the decline in U.S. homicide rates since 1991.
How Car Culture Distorted the Lead Crisis
Coddling the car and mythologizing the automobile have perpetuated harmful narratives about lead exposure. While lead paint served as a major source of lead poisoning, particularly in low-income, hypersegregated urban areas, society and media focused on blaming the lead crisis on "paint chip-eating BLACK children in the ghetto, with awful single mothers" crafting a narrative similar to the "crack baby" myth. This framing turned (and continues to play in the background) a widespread public health crisis into a deficit myth rooted in racism, ignoring the institutional failures, the proliferation of the car over all other modes of transportation— that affected all communities exposed to lead, regardless of race.