Racial Inequity and the Sleep Gap

I came across an interesting Op-Ed today in the Los Angeles Times written by Benjamin Reiss, an English professor at Emory University, about the discrepancies in sleep between African Americans and other ethnicities in the United States.

In the article, Reiss argues that we forget to study how racial inequity can affect people while they sleep! As a result of environmental stressors such as finding a neighborhood with good schools and jobs as well as unfair treatment from the police and other branches of the law, Reiss writes, “race shapes our sleep, a relationship that has surprising roots deep in our national past.”[1]

If you’re like me, you might be wondering how sleep could be historically linked.

Basically, Reiss argues that because of historically negative treatment of African Americans, they are more likely to live in environments where stress is extremely common and does not necessarily end once the work day is complete. Reiss writes that there is a “sleep gap” between African Americans and Americans from other ethnicities; after a sleep study, Reiss concludes that there are fewer black people who are able to sleep 6-9 hours each night than any other ethnic group tested. Moreover, Reiss writes that historically, slave owners “justified overwork and minimal rest as a positive good” in order to support far-fetched theories based in scientific racism. He goes on to cite some famous slaveholders, like Thomas Jefferson, who thought that slaves simply didn’t require as much sleep as white people.

This article is an interesting read, especially if you are interested in the stereotype of the “lazy black man,” tracing its origin not only to slaveholders’ greed but also linking it to the tangible evidence of the sleep gap that is perpetuated by present-day racial inequity.

Here’s a link! http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-race-sleep-gap-20170423-story.html   

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[1] Benjamin Reiss, “African Americans don’t sleep as well as whites, an inequality stretching back to slavery,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-race-sleep-gap-20170423-story.html.