My impression is that individual sleep patterns are pretty idiosyncratic, so I’m not aware of strong racial differences. In theory, however, it seems possible that people whose ancestors evolved in tropical climates where only mad dogs and Englishmen don’t nap during the noonday sun would be less well-suited to the Anglo-American schedule of 16 hours up without a nap followed by 8 hours down than would people whose ancestors invented that schedule…
Obviously, the solution to black people sleeping poorly for fear of crime is to let huge numbers of black criminals out of prison…
Seriously, as everybody knows, although of course it’s not mentioned in this article, black neighborhoods, at least before everybody moves out, tend to be LOUD…
Another way, that’s also not mentioned in this article, for blacks to get more sleep is to turn off the TV.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* My guess is blacks are more obese (documented fact). More obesity equals more sleep apnea, and more sleep apnea means more disturbed sleep.
* Free Ambien for our dusky brethren.
* I’ve tried just about every type of earplug and I think the silicon ones are by far the best. You can pick off as much as you want from the plug (they’re usually too big) and mould it to your preferred shape. There’s a trick in inserting them to maximum effect. You gently pull your ear wider as you put it in and then let it close around it when it’s in place, to ensure all the air is expelled and none gets trapped behind the plug. Then you bed them in gently ten minutes later when they’re warmer and softer.
* I sometimes wonder if black people actually have less sensitive hearing than whites. Otherwise how to explain not only their tolerance for very loud music (e.g. playing a boombox on max volume *inside a car*!), but also their tendency to walk down the street shouting at each other – not in anger, but just in ‘normal’ conversation.
* Has anybody been following the recent tragic story of the white GE employee hacked to death in Dallas while jogging while white, by a crazed, Black, ex football player with a machete. The national media has been silent on this one. I have been following the story and the murdered man’s wife just committed suicide two weeks after her husband was attacked. Terrible, awful thing this is! That is the kind of stuff/racism that keeps me up at night!
* Isn’t there another theory out there explaining away IQ differences as resulting from the exhausting effects of living in the hood and having a greater multitude of things to worry about? Brooks or Friedman was pimping it–hard to tell the two apart sometimes. So laughable; one of the things whites envy most about blacks is their apparent lack of perturbation, while we are supposed to be “uptight” worriers.
I’m just racist enough to think it’s correlated to cognitive differences; think more deeply, sleep more deeply. They should just go ahead and match sleep patterns against IQ. Or, it’s a warm weather/cold weather adaptation. Maybe on the Savannah, sharing environment with more and bigger predators, it’s a better adaptation to be more easily roused from sleep.
* I’ve heard many times that minorities have low self esteem due to racism, stereotype threat, etc., but surveys show black children actually have the highest self esteem, confidence, and self regard.
* You can always tell when a black-owned television is broken. It’s off. I’m a landlord and I’m just barely joking.
* I don’t suppose anyone thought of bench marking there data by actually going Africa and checking the sleep levels of native Africans.
* I’d think Arabs would have the most trouble sleeping. They seem pissed off 24/7.
* A government subsidy for science or the arts is a form of censorship.
* Who hasn’t noticed from watching Tarantino’s movies his profound sympathy for the victims of violence and his disgust at the perpetrators of violence?
* Well, seems to me everyone is overlooking the fact that the best time of day for stealing hubcaps, hiding from cops, pimpin’ hos, and getting yo baby mama pregnant, etc. is the middle of the night.
* This gives me my new jab tweet response when called racist for noticin’: “You sleepy, bro?”
* Always interesting going out for 10:30 pm or later movie and seeing African American mothers out with children under ten. Many movie theaters by where I used to live had to adapt a rule that no kids under 12 could be admitted to R movie after 8pm.
* 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.
