Peter Frost writes: African Americans sleep on average almost an hour less than do Euro Americans. The two groups have mean sleep times of 6.05 hours and 6.85 hours. This finding has recently been discussed by Brian Resnick in National Journal and by our Steve Sailer.
Researchers reject a genetic explanation: “There is a consensus that innate biological differences between blacks and whites are not a factor” (Resnick, 2015). So what is the cause?
One study points the finger at racism: “If you can take out that discrimination piece, the average African-American and the average Caucasian look at lot more similar. […] “It’s not perfect, but in terms of sleep, a lot of the disparity goes away” (Resnick, 2015).
The study is by Tomfohr et al. (2012). It found that duration of deep sleep and duration of Stage 2 of light sleep correlated in African Americans with perceived discrimination, which is defined as “the extent to which an individual believes that members of his or her ethnic group have been discriminated against in society.”
Nonetheless, as the authors note, sleep duration still differs significantly between African and Euro Americans even when the difference is adjusted for the effects of perceived discrimination. So we are left with a curious finding: two separate causes, one genetic and the other environmental, are producing the same pattern of effects. Both are reducing deep sleep and Stage 2 light sleep in African Americans while not affecting Stage 1 light sleep…
So African Americans are getting enough sleep at night. It’s just that they’re not getting enough afternoon naps. But aren’t naps for kids? Or old fogeys? Actually, they’re quite normal for adults in much of the world. In the Nigerian study, 82% of the participants regularly took afternoon naps.
It’s ironic that the “r word” has been injected into this debate. If a behavior deviates from the white American norm, and if racism is held responsible either directly or indirectly, one is assuming that this deviation is pathological. It is “deviant.” It shouldn’t exist and something should be done about it. The white American norm thus becomes a norm for all humans, and all humans—if they want to be fully human—should strive toward it.
In reality, there is no single human nature. Genetic evolution didn’t slow down when humans began to split up and settle the different continents. It accelerated. And not just because our ancestors were adapting to different natural environments. Most of the acceleration took place long after the globe had been settled from the equator to the arctic. It happened when humans began to adapt to an increasingly diverse range of cultural environments. And those adaptations were mostly behavioral and psychological.
One of them is the way we sleep. The African sleep pattern is normal in its native environment. It is simply an adaptation to a particular set of circumstances, just as the northern European sleep pattern is an adaptation to another set of circumstances.
COMMENTS:
* Sleep is not really about preserving energy or recharging the body’s physical batteries, although these can be secondary effects of sleep. The primary and quintessential purpose of sleep, however, is maintaining proper mental functioning.
We sleep so that we may dream. We dream so that we may integrate new sensory perceptions into our existing patterns of behavior and respond accordingly to an ever-changing environment. This is a necessity of animal existence.
Plant life is defined by the nutritive faculty only and is the simplest form of life. Plants neither sense, move, nor reason; they just take in nourishment and grow, all of it unconsciously. A plant is not entirely separate from the landscape and setting in which it appears; rather it forms a part of that setting. Using a bit of poetic license, one might say that the plant is an extension from the soil in which it grows. It is the soil in which it grows–the life bearing capacity of the soil at highest potential.
Animal life is defined by the both the nutritive and sensory faculties. Animals also take in nourishment and grow (indeed, the animal “body,” considered in abstraction, is just a plant); but in addition to the body there is also the animal “self.” Unlike the plant, every free-living animal is an individual, a microcosm within a macrocosm, and stands separate and apart from its environment. The ability to sense means that there is a distinction between that who senses and everything else in creation. The animal is not unconscious like the plant; it has to care for itself. It senses, and it must respond to that which it perceives. Such responses we call “motion,” using the word in an expansive sense. Thus sensory perception and motion go together.
In the higher animals, the interface between the microcosm and the macrocosm increasingly becomes embodied in the functioning of the nervous system, whose job it is to integrate the impressions left on the sense organs and to modulate the organism’s responses to them. The nervous system’s ability to perform this function, however, is not unlimited. When the organism can no longer receive sense impressions or generate responses, tiredness is experienced and sleep ensues. The body becomes a plant again; and the mind, temporarily cut off from pressing demands, is free to digest the material of the day.
For human beings there is an additional element. Human life is defined by the nutritive, sensory, and rational faculties–man is the rational animal. Therefore, in addition to the mere sense impressions of the animals there is added to our experience the whole new dimension of words and concepts. This is what gives human dreams their particularly surreal quality, as the relationship between material sense impressions and immaterial concepts is undergoing constant adjustment in the theater of the mind.
All of this can be summed up in a simple relationship: The greater the strains of mental activity, the more need there is to sleep and to dream, and in fact this is exactly what we find. Children, to whom the world is constantly affording new experiences and who are actively learning all the time, sleep and dream more than adults; intellectual workers dream more than manual laborers; people in new circumstances (e.g. moving or changing careers) experience an uptick in dream activity; and people under great duress, who have just endured the loss of a loved one or a divorce, or are otherwise in the depths of some spiritual crisis, even though they often suffer from sleep disturbances, are prone to have the most piercing and lurid dreams of all. Finally, people who are deliberately deprived of sleep in psychological experiments are known to undergo a pronounced mental deterioration which ultimately results in psychosis and death. Well-adjusted adults with settled lives and few existential concerns infrequently remember their dreams and can get by on the least amount of sleep.
The relevance of these data to the present article I will leave to the reader to determine, but my guess is that the exact opposite of the article’s contention is in fact the truth. Blacks today are generally less worried and stressed out than whites.
And that only stands to reason.
