RACISM IN SLEEP?: The National Journal reports on the “Black-White Sleep Gap.”
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. This past June, the journal Sleep published a study on the sleep quality of black, white, Chinese, and Hispanic adults in six cities across the United States. The participants were pooled from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a cohort of more than 6,000 people who, for the last 15 years, have been intermittently pricked, prodded, and assessed to discover how geography and race influence health over time. (More than 950 papers have been published on this cohort. It’s from them that researchers have found evidence that the farther people live from a wealthier area, the more likely they are to develop insulin resistance—or that blacks appear to have higher levels of the substances that cause blood to clot.) . . .
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? It’s an intriguing and still somewhat open-ended scientific mystery.
The statistical disparate impact of sleep is just further evidence, of course, of “white privilege.”