Tonight, a story about another black-white “gap”. This time it’s a “sleep gap”: “an unexpected challenge in the quest for racial justice”.
We read:
In 2005, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, began an experiment that would last five years. One by one, they brought 164 study participants to a sleep lab at the U.C. San Diego Medical Center, a room with a sweeping view of the city and the surrounding valley. There, participants underwent polysomnography, the most comprehensive sleep test known to science.
… The San Diego researchers planned to use the polysomnography machine to document slow-wave sleep””the phase of sleep “when it’s really hard to wake you up,’ as Tomfohr describes it. Slow-wave sleep is thought to be the most restorative period of sleep, and it’s important to good health: Experiments where people are denied slow-wave sleep on purpose have shown that bodies quickly change for the worse.
… But it wasn’t just slow-wave sleep in general that interested the researchers; they specifically hoped to compare how blacks and whites experienced slow-wave sleep. And what they found was disturbing. Generally, people are thought to spend 20 percent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white participants hit this mark. Black participants, however, spent only about 15 percent of the night in slow-wave sleep. The study was just one data point in a mounting pile of evidence that black Americans aren’t sleeping as well as whites.
That’s not all. We learn also that:
[R]esearchers have found evidence that the farther people live from a wealthier area, the more likely they are to develop insulin resistance…
If only there were some way we could get people to live at equal distances from wealthy areas…
… but we’ll have leave that for another session of SCOTUS, I’m afraid. Anyway, getting back to sleep:
What’s more, the sleep discrepancy persisted even when the researchers tried to control for economic factors: As blacks got wealthier, the gap in sleep narrowed, but did not go away entirely. “The race gap is decreased if you take into account some indicator of economics,’ says Lauderdale, “but it’s not eliminated in the data that I have looked at.’ Indeed, in the San Diego study, researchers also concluded that there were racial differences in sleep regardless of income. (It should be noted, however, that researchers concede their attempts to control for economic indicators are far from perfect. “We know our measures for adjusting for socioeconomic status are still somewhat limited,’ says Redline. “Sometimes the variation isn’t great enough.’)
So what explains the gap?
What indeed?
It’s an intriguing and still somewhat open-ended scientific mystery. (And one that is that gradually getting more and more attention: In July, the radio program Freakonomics dedicated a segment to documenting the discrepancy and trying to explain why it might exist.) But the black-white sleep gap isn’t just a question for science; it also has implications for the policy world. Sleep, after all, may be a key factor in a tragic spiral: It appears to be both a symptom of health problems that disproportionately affect black communities and also a cause of those same problems.
The question, obviously, is:
Are there policy interventions that could, realistically, help to improve how black Americans sleep?
The government must get to work at once! But before we can enact costly policies, though, of course we’ll need to know exactly what the real cause is, right? (Like maybe black people and white people are just, well, different in some way that manifests itself, directly or indirectly, in different sleep patterns?)
…Ha! Just kidding:
On the question of how to explain the black-white sleep gap itself, researchers have a number of related theories. (There is a consensus that innate biological differences between blacks and whites are not a factor.)
Oh, OK. (No need to tell us why there is such a consensus, or give us any data, or anything.)
We’re pretty sure we’ve got our eye on the culprit, and what it is that “relates” all those theories:
The stress caused by discrimination is one strong possibility. In the San Diego sleep study, Tomfohr’s team knew, going in, that slow-wave sleep is very sensitive to stress””which is, in turn, our body’s signal to remain vigilant against perceived threats, including discrimination. “That was our thought: If people are feeling really discriminated against, then of course they are not going to want to get into a really deep stage of sleep,’ she says.
The envelope, please…
…Racism it is!!
Any questions? I thought not. Good.
13 Comments
“There is a “consensus” that innate differences between blacks and whites are not a factor”? What a tidy, no fuss no muss way to shut off that which scientists angling for more funding just don’t want to deal with. Medical science becomes social science then social science becomes public policy and then public policy becomes constituent based entitlement.
What this sleep research will eventually tie itself to is a small opinion the USSC handed down a few months ago that was overlooked because of the major items of treachery they decided which dominated the news. Specifically–
“Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project (heard January 21, 2015; decided June 25, 2015)
A divided Court backed the concept of disparate impact, where housing policies with outcomes that discriminate can be challenged under the terms of the Fair Housing Act, even if there wasn’t a deliberate intent to discriminate.
This case began in 2008, when the Inclusive Communities Project (or ICP) filed a lawsuit against the Texas state agency for the distribution of tax credits in a way that reinforces and increases racial segregation. Because landlords who receive the tax credits are required to accept affordable-housing vouchers from low-income tenants–many of whom come from minority communities–the allocation of those credits has an outsized impact on racial housing patterns. Courts at the district and circuit levels agreed with the ICP, concluding that Texas’ distribution of tax credits violated the Fair Housing Act because of its “disparate impact” on minorities.
“The court acknowledges the Fair Housing Act’s continuing role in moving the nation toward a more integrated society,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion.”
This decision goes far beyond just the matter in Texas. Nationally it will find its way into every housing development of every kind where any Federal dollars might be involved. With this and any “science” they can point to, the social engineers and central planners will begin designing the communities they imagine in their own utopian make believe.
Science? Bah humbug! Oh, wait — wrong holiday. Nevermind.
Henry…you’re looking for the wrong costume.
Robert, my costume is always the same: jeans, T-shirt, running shoes, and ball cap. Yup, I am masquerading as a scientist.
[The long white lab coats are only worn in TV commercials.]
Oddly, this putative problem doesn’t seem to be one blacks–who are socially encouraged to bellyache loudly about perceived problems and suffered injustices–have any self-awareness of.
In 2010 and 2014, the GSS asked respondents how often they’ve had trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep in the past year. The percentages among whites (n = 1,802), blacks (n = 354), and Hispanics (n = 127) who answered either “often” or “sometimes”:
White — 57.5%
Black — 48.4%
Hispanic — 55.2%
Curiously, the ordering runs in the opposite direction of what the oppression narrative would suggest. Perhaps it’s the guilt weighing on whites and the clean consciences blacks enjoy that allow the latter to sleep better than the former despite the disadvantages they suffer in terms of poverty, discrimination, and loud music!
The item contains four possible responses–often, sometimes, rarely, never. If we just look at “often”, we get 23.1% for whites, 15.8% for blacks, and 19.1% for Hispanics. If we go the other direction and look at “never” responses, we get 17.0% for whites, 21.9% for blacks, and 21.9% for Hispanics.
No matter how it is sliced, blacks report significantly less trouble sleeping well than whites do.
Nevertheless, the Leftist slicers will find a way to muckrake lies, damn lies, and statistics to “document” their social agenda.
Never let muck raked lies ie social science go to waste. They will build communities with this stuff.
A few years from now, someone will try to replicate this study and find different results. Social science isn’t science anymore. It’s just a way to restate the narrative.
And it’s not just social science. Look what I just found:
“The paper, published in the BMJ in 1989 by Dr. Ranjit Chandra, then based at Memorial University in St. John’s, is being pulled as a result of mounting evidence that he falsified information, fabricated study participants and had no raw data to back up the claims made by his research into the rate of eczema among babies who were either breast or formula fed.
The study concluded that eczema rates were low in breastfed babies whose mothers avoided dairy, peanuts and other allergens. The rates were similarly low for babies fed a special hypoallergenic formula compared with those that consumed soy- or cow’s milk-based formula. This led Dr. Chandra to recommend hypoallergenic formula to babies at risk of eczema if their mothers chose not to breastfeed. The study was funded in part by Mead Johnson, which produced the hypoallergenic formula used in the study.”
Quick. Somebody get into the hands of those researchers at the University of California, San Diego, this website!
It simply must be some kinda stereotyping.
http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/definition.html
Right, Dom: replication is becoming a troublesome issue in science generally.
We don’t need no stinkin’ replication …
One would think it would be simple enough to find a control group for this sort of thing. Just replicate the tests over in Africa and the West Indies, and with immigrants to the U.S. from those places. Hey Mr. Sowell, can you weigh in?