Welcome to a new year at APA. I am honored and excited to serve as your 2019 president as we continue making transformational changes to enhance our organization and the discipline of psychology. Throughout my presidency, my priority is to focus on how APA can use psychological science to solve real-world problems and to welcome all psychologists and students into the organization. In addition, my presidential initiative for the year is to address deep poverty using all that psychology has to offer.
To highlight my commitment to my presidential initiative, let me share part of my story. I grew up in deep poverty. Ten members of our family of 14 lived in a four-room shotgun house in Memphis. We bathed in the same tin tub where we washed our clothes, which would be hung to dry on a clothesline stretched across the dirt yard we shared with neighbors.
Madea, my mother, was creative about making sure we children ate, cooking big pots of beans and plenty of cornbread. My father, Jake, made less than $3,000 a year as a garbage collector. In 1968, he participated in the “I Am a Man” sanitation strike in Memphis just days before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
I was inspired to examine extreme poverty after learning about research that indicated if one is born in the bottom economic quintile in the United States, the chance for reaching the top quintile is, at most, 12.9 percent. In Memphis, where I still live, that prospect drops to 3 percent. There is something very wrong in a society with such limited opportunities for moving up.
What does psychology have to offer that can help us change that? We must use our science to demonstrate how eradicating poverty is good for public health. We must stop blaming people for being poor. You’ll hear more about the power of psychological science, as it will be a focal point of our work this year.
In the coming months, I will encourage you to be involved with our focus on extreme poverty by bringing psychology to the forefront of this issue. I challenge us to dream bigger about what APA can do as a premier organization that uses psychology to benefit society and improve people’s lives.