…someone just has to figure out how and why. Or just assume how and why. Oh, hell, just hand over the reparations already!
Researchers believe that black Americans are likely to have more trouble sleeping than the white Americans who oppress them. In fact, the darker your skin color is, the less sleep you get, says Dr. Dayna A. Johnson, a sleep epidemiologist at Emory University. “The theory is that racial minorities experience a stress that is unique and chronic and additive to the general stressors that all people experience,” said Johnson, a sleep disparity pioneer. “We all experience stress, but there are added stressors for certain groups. For certain populations, racism fits into that category.”
A Johnson-headed study published in the journal “Sleep” claims to find that experiencing racism and can cause people to have problems falling asleep. (What did the researchers do, hire people to racially discriminate against their subjects before bedtime?) The study also concluded that people who anticipate racism may experience interference with their sleep-wake cycle because the dread causes their body to be in a heightened state of anxiety, with higher blood pressure and accelerating heart rate. By this, I glean that being told by the media, politicians and race-hucksters that American society is all racist all the time causes black Americans to lose sleep. Got it. And being white, this is my fault.
Just for the heck of it and because I’m curious, I’m going to look for a photo of Dayla. I swear I know nothing about her. Let’s see.. .Here she is!
I’m not assuming that she has a bias or anything even though she’s assuming that I do. But back to the study…
Structural racism is a fundamental reason for sleep disparities, Johnson says, explaining that people of color tend to live in neighborhoods that are not conducive to sleep—they are called “sleep deserts.” Noisier neighborhoods hinder sleep—you know, all those white people who sneak in at night and play their accordions. Feeling unsafe keeps you awake at night. Places with higher pollution are often close to highways and have fewer trees and sidewalks, causing blacks and other dark-skinned citizens to suffer from sleep apnea and not to be able to exercise easily, she hypothesizes. Dr. Johnson also says that he longer a foreign-born person lives in the U.S., the worse their sleep becomes, probably from accumulated stress from language barriers and other factors.
Taking some cues from Dr. Johnson, Dr. Ivan Wu, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, is working on the “sleep equity” problem, concentrating on counseling and helping communities at risk of sleeplessness address the factors that they can control. One example one of Wu’s colleagues offered: In many Somali-American homes in the Twin Cities, family members are kept awake by smoke detectors with low batteries beeping all night. Apparently many believe that they are supposed to beep. the devices beep when they’re working properly, so they just try to live with them.
You know. Racism.
I stopped reading when I read about the smoke alarms. I might go back and finish later after I gather up all the brain and skull fragments.
Coincidentally I’m having a terrible time sleeping recently, perhaps because my wife just died, I’m struggling with bills and business, and every day is bringing some new horror to my attention. But they’re my problems, I’m privileged, and I can’t blame anyone else for them.
Ethics Alarms 
“Places with higher pollution are often close to highways and have fewer trees” (bolds mine)
At the risk of requiring more cranial debris collection, sometimes MORE trees can be RAYcist.
PWS
CA Reparations Report Demands Tree Planting In Black Neighborhoods for SHADE EQUITY
PWS
SHADE EQUITY
Frankly, Houston/Harris County officials have been making the same claims.
jvb
This looks a lot like a causation/correlation issue.
I bet you would see similar differences if you group people socio-economically. (Poorer people are probably more stressed and don’t sleep as well.)
Age? Younger people can get by on less sleep, so they often do.
Geography? If I had to bet, places with less sunlight have people who sleep more (though the modern lightbulb has changed that quite a bit.)
More geography? The closer you get to large urban areas, the less sleep you get.
And, Somalis and smoke detectors? That seems more like a culture shock issue. So, yes, the closer your cultural background is to a modern Western society, the more sleep you are likely to get.
Without checking, I have to assume (because I don’t have the time or desire to check) that her study controlled for all of these variables and, after eliminating them, the conclusion that race is the issue is the only viable conclusion.
But, seriously, you can choose any number of different metrics and you will get results, many of which will show.
And, why pick the groups they picked? Asians are all lumped together, while I bet that the recent Hmong arrivals would be different from Chinese and Japanese groups that have been here for generations. (And, the Indians probably throw the curve.)
And, Somalis are lumped in under the general “Black” category?
Hispanics and Latinos? Why distinguish them, especially when their numbers are the same.
Then you have Native American, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian (all of which could be lumped together), and Pacific Islander (what are we talking here? American Samoa?). And, again, some of those show no difference between the different groups.
-Jut
But…but..Science!!!!
Meanwhile, if you’re so clueless about things in your adopted nation that you let a smoke alarm beep all night, I really don’t care about your other problems because you are too dumb to put your socks on before your shoes.
yeaaah….science.
I am sympathetic to immigrants who experience culture shock—even if they suffer from negligent ignorance.
but, that example alone calls into question the conclusions of the study. It is a concrete example of sleep problems caused by something completely unrelated to systemic racism.
-Jut
At this point, left-wing talking points are beginning to take on the character of a religious call-and-response chant. They don’t interrogate the meaning of the words, they simply give the expected response to the prompt.
Abortion restrictions? LGBT hardest hit. Why on earth would that be? Don’t ask.
Earthquakes in New Jersey? Global warming. How? Don’t ask.
Sleep problems? Structural racism, including beeping smoke detectors. What do beeping smoke detectors have to do with racism? Don’t ask.
I recently saw an article about a 49 year-old “professional musician” who got $250k in student loans forgiven – a loan he wasn’t paying on and essentially never had paid on. He dutifully regurgitated the line about “freeing up money to buy a house or have kids” that’s boilerplate cant for the loan forgiveness crowd. But he hadn’t been paying on the loan, there is no money being freed up.
Now every time I read stuff like this, I subconsciously hear it in that monotone church chant that lilts and drops at the end of each verse.
Dave, I’d liken it more to lab rats hitting a button that releases food. “Academics” are trained to hit the “systemic racism” button, and the grant money comes gushing out into their cage. It’s my understanding grant money is only less addictive than nicotine and ahead of each and all of cocaine, meth and heroine combined.
This stuff does seem to be written by neo-Nazis or the KKK.
Things that disproportionately negatively affect ‘people of color’.
poverty
unemployment
any disease known to man
hunger
thirst
education
climate change
insomnia
weather
air
math
IQ tests
If all that is true, it would seem that ‘people of color’ ARE inferior to whites. If whites have higher IQ, higher educational ability, are more resistant to disease, more readily tolerate changes in environment, and pretty much are better at handling any other adverse condition, that wold be the very definition of ‘superior’.
The one today was a company being sued because it was using background checks for employment. Since ‘people of color’ commit more crimes, this is racist.
Do the people pushing this realize how racist these tropes are?
This is where we are politically, socially, and culturally right now.
I’ve been writing about the absurdities in our society and culture for a while now. It’s getting worse and the absolute absurdity of that story about the smoke detectors beeping is another piece of evidence to show that people have been brainwashed into believing that correlation equals causation and it’s getting worse.
Don’t underestimate how stupid stupid people can get, they will surprise you every time.
Paul Joseph Goebbels the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 put false propaganda into practice building it to absurd levels of public acceptability using the principle that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. This is exactly the kind of tactic we are seeing in the United States with all the claims of systemic racism, DEI, men are women if they think or feel it, apocalyptic climate change, it’s free speech to shout down free speech, etc.
We are captured in a time bubble where truth, logic, critical thinking and common sense are openly rejected in favor of reactionary emotional thinking which leads to absurd conclusions.
my underwear draw was in order so I read the full study. It cured my insomnia.