Researchers at the University of California, San Diego conducted a sleep experiment 10 years ago and those results are now being studied under a new lens of scrutiny to find out why blacks aren't sleeping as well as whites. The sleep patterns among races is slowly becoming a regular field of study as the conversation of all-things-black-matter movements continue sweeping the nation into a racial divide not seen in decades.

The specific details of the initial study, along with the latest experiments conducted over the summer, were recently published in the National Journal. An excerpt was posted to a forum called Right Nation, and is the source for this article.

"The Black-White Sleep Gap," a label given by the Journal, is most evidenced to researchers by the amount of slow-wave sleep an individual experiences each night. For most people, this "hard to wake you up" type of deep sleep occurs for only about 20% of the night. But for blacks who participated in the study, they only experienced this slow-wave sleep for about 15% of the night.

This seemingly small difference is considered "just one data point in the mounting pile of evidence that black Americans aren't sleeping as well as whites," according to the Journal. Newer studies have had the same conclusions: "Afric­an-Amer­ic­ans, as a group, are get­ting the least amount of sleep com­pared, at least, to the three oth­er groups.” 

A Harvard study recently concluded that whites sleep 6.85 hours on average per night, while blacks sleep 6.05 hours. University of Chicago researchers have been running sleep tests since the early 2000s and have found at least an hour difference in sleep between the two races.

They even looked at socioeconomic factors and found that wealthier blacks slept longer, but the gap didn't go away entirely. Researches have concluded that the wealth gap remains too wide between blacks and whites to make much of a difference.

So what's the conclusion? Anyone's guess is as good as any other. But rest assured it will have something to do with government intervention as it always does. And the final paragraph in the Journal reinforces that claim:

It’s an in­triguing and still some­what open-ended sci­entif­ic mys­tery. (And one that is gradu­ally get­ting more and more at­ten­tion: In Ju­ly, the ra­dio pro­gram Freakonomics ded­icated a seg­ment to doc­u­ment­ing the dis­crep­ancy and trying to ex­plain why it might ex­ist.) But the black-white sleep gap isn’t just a ques­tion for sci­ence; it also has im­plic­a­tions for the policy world. Sleep, after all, may be a key factor in a tra­gic spir­al: It ap­pears to be both a symp­tom of health prob­lems that dispro­por­tion­ately af­fect black communities and also a cause of those same prob­lems. Which is why it seems worth ask­ing: Are there policy in­ter­ven­tions that could, real­ist­ic­ally, help to im­prove how black Amer­ic­ans sleep?