by DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Moleendo Stewart sees inequality as playing a role in his sleep problems. PHOTO/Benjamin Norman/The New York Times
Moleendo Stewart can’t say for sure what’s caused his lifelong sleeping problems. But he has his suspicions.
There’s the childhood spent in loud, restless neighborhoods in Miami. “You hear people shooting guns all night, dealing drugs,” said Mr. Stewart, 41, who lives in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He also cites his weight, 260 pounds, down from a peak of 310.
Sleep experts would point to another factor working against Mr. Stewart: He is a black man.
The idea that race or ethnicity might help determine how well people sleep is relatively new among sleep researchers. But in the few short years that epidemiologists, demographers and psychologists have been studying the link, they have repeatedly come to the same conclusion: In the United States, at least, sleep is not colorblind.
Non-Hispanic whites get more and better-quality sleep than people of other races, studies repeatedly show. Blacks are the most likely to get shorter, more restless sleep.
What researchers don’t yet know is why.
“We’re not at a point where we can say for certain is it nature versus nurture, is it race or is it socioeconomics,” said Dr. Michael A. Grandner, a research associate with the Center for Sleep and Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania. But when it comes to sleep, “there is a unique factor of race we’re still trying to understand.”
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