Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS  Jack Shonkoff, M.D., Harvard University Source: Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On July 22, 2024, Jack Shonkoff, M.D., founder of the “toxic stress” movement, posted his aims for the next phase. In May 2024, he stepped down as director of the center he founded to assume a new role as Founding Director. Who Did This? Jack Shonkoff is a pediatrician who has run an advocacy center at Harvard University for the past two decades. He has done more than anyone to advance the hypothesis that trauma and stress permanently damage brains and bodies, and to leverage that vision to influence policy. The Claim Shonkoff’s post stated his new goals for advocacy would be directed by a trilogy of three working papers produced by his Harvard-based work group he calls the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child:
To emphasize the major nature of this shift, Shonkoff called the Center’s past agenda Early Childhood Development 1.0 (ECD 1.0), and christened the new agenda ECD 2.0. Analysis The validity of toxic stress is lacking because it is based on weak cross-sectional studies, lacks a feasible mechanism, and stronger prospective, pre-trauma studies consistently fail to support it. Likewise, there is no good evidence that the psychological stress of racial discrimination permanently damages brains or causes physical illnesses [See here and here] Another concern is that Shonkoff blended into these papers an analysis that minorities tend to have more health problems because they tend to live in environments plagued by material hazards (e.g., air pollution and lead), and that this situation was due to discriminatory policies. This, however, is not consistent with the toxic stress theory, because the mechanism of stress is material toxins that would harm any racial group. This contrasts to the theory that racial discrimination is a mechanism of psychological toxin, consistent with the toxic stress theory. Shonkoff made no effort to clarify the difference in mechanisms. When claiming that all your work is “science-based,” confusing two completely different mechanisms is indefensible. The tortured language opens a whole new area of advocacy that has no connection to the original theory of psychological stress. Why Is This Happening? The emphasis on racial discrimination is a sharp turn for the Council’s working paper series. The first fourteen papers, which spanned 2004-2018, never used the words race or racial to refer to stress. The Council’s reason for this sudden shift was just “21st-century science,” as Working Paper 15 reminded readers five times, omitting to mention that studies on racial discrimination stress had existed since the 1980s [1]. It seems curious that Working Paper 15 appeared in the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter riots, when it became commonplace to frame nearly any problem in the U.S. as systemic racism. Like all cultural revolutions that make progressive leftists feel exhilarated and truly alive [2] (e.g., Marxism, communism, the New Deal, the Great Society, man-made climate change, DEI, etc.), conflict, not outcomes, seems to be the point, and so they are eternal, and the revolutions need to be refreshed every now and then. Shonkoff, always a skilled wordsmith, expertly crafted the shift as being driven by new science, but, as usual, he gets the science wrong. If you’re a foot soldier for toxic stress, take note; you’re being handed a new party policy. REFERENCES [1] Barbarin, O. A. (1983). Coping with ecological transitions by Black families: A psychosocial model. Journal of Community Psychology, 11(4), 308–322. doi: 10.1002/1520-0629(198310)11:4<308::AID-JCOP2290110405>3.0.CO;2-Z Jung, H. (1984). Indo-Chinese refugee services in metropolitan Boston: An impressionistic assessment. Asian American Psychological Association Journal, 16–18. [2] Gornick, V (1977). The Romance of American Communism. Verso: London Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Comments are closed.
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