Rod Dreher

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Why do way more black babies die?

By Rod Dreher • October 17, 2011, 9:36 AM

Steve Sailer sees something interesting that’s not said in a report on black infant mortality rates. The report, in the NYT, compares the rate of whites to that of blacks, which is 2.5 times higher. Why? The newspaper brings up the usual poverty-related explanations, but Sailer points out that Hispanics in the U.S., who have more than double the poverty rate of whites, actually have a lower infant mortality rate than whites. Why isn’t this considered relevant by the reporter to the quest for why blacks suffer from a vastly higher rate? Sailer snarks:

There are now 50,000,000+ Hispanics in the U.S. We’re not supposed to notice their failures. Can we at least notice their successes?

17 Responses to Why do way more black babies die?

MichaelS says:

October 17, 2011 at 9:58 am

“why blacks suffer from a vastly higher rate?…”

Answer: as you have often noted, the liberal religion of the NYT excludes Culture, Custom, and Habit (especially if it’s decadent and non-white) from any allowable explanation.
Thomas says:

October 17, 2011 at 10:37 am

The rate of infant survival shoots up significantly if the mother breastfeeds.

I believe that a relatively low number of black women (compared to whites) breastfeed. Maybe this has something to do with it?

Hispanics (the ones who have not yet acculturated to America) breastfeed more often than whites.
absurdbeats says:

October 17, 2011 at 10:40 am

The Times brings up more than “the usual poverty-related explanations”; it also notes that “Recent studies have shown that poverty, education, access to prenatal care, smoking and even low birth weight do not alone explain the racial gap in infant mortality, and that even black women with graduate degrees are more likely to lose a child in its first year than are white women who did not finish high school. Research is now focusing on stress as a factor and whether black women have shorter birth canals”—which seems to indicate that more than poverty is at issue.

More to the point, the article notes that high rate of infant mortality among African-Americans is a multifactorial puzzle.

As to why infant mortality rate among Hispanics (which is a ludicrously imprecise term) is lower than that of African-Americans, well that is a good question, but, again, as the article notes that more than poverty is in play, not necessarily relevant regarding rates among African-Americans.
Noah says:

October 17, 2011 at 11:21 am

Sailer’s point, one he makes often in his writings, is that prevailing taboos prevent us from discussing biological differences between racial groups. The Left thinks that if biological reality of racial difference gains broad acceptance, then there will be, inevitably, another Holocaust. Many on the Right also oppose such discussions because discussing these biological differences leads to talk of evolution, which has sadly become a polarized, politicized topic.
Rod Dreher says:

October 17, 2011 at 11:24 am

Given the history of racism — including the part that most progressives leave out: the progressive enthusiasm for eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — people are quite right to be very, very nervous about these discussions. I know I am. Yet I agree that we have to be careful about suppressing discussion of scientifically valid findings because they break social taboos. It’s a difficult thing to figure out how to approach in a morally responsible way.
Sheldon says:

October 17, 2011 at 12:47 pm

Anecdote, not data, but many years ago when we were looking to adopt a baby, and the wait was going on too long, we told the state agency we would consider adopting a black baby. The response from the social worker was a surprising “talk to your doctor first,” without explanation. Two different family physicians we spoke to about this immediately said not to proceed – the absence of healthy prenatal care in that community would significantly increase the likelihood of a physically challlenged child. It was extremely depressing to hear.
Sheldon says:

October 17, 2011 at 12:48 pm

I should correct my post to say “healthy prenatal care in a PART of that community.”
Clare Krishan says:

October 17, 2011 at 1:12 pm

ditto re: “the absence of healthy prenatal care”
and may I add, prevalence of repeat abortions which do irreparable reproductive harm (lethal to the present occupant of course, and harmful to all future occupants of the uterus)

Tracking historical trends may bear this out, as repeat abortions are trending higher in other parts of the maternal healthcare constituency.

Abortion as contraception is a blight on the future of all families, but most especially vulnerable African American ones.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 17, 2011 at 5:12 pm

Don’t forget that a fair number of those 50 million Hispanics are of partly African descent, including many who don’t think that way, or don’t even know it. Puerto Ricans for sure, but not a few Mexicans as well. I would guess that 2/3 of so-called “white folks” are part African in this country also. There was a lot of intermarriage with indentured servants up through the late 18th century.

We don’t have to be afraid of rather modest inherited differences, if we remember that some “black” characteristics are shared by Greeks, that lactose intolerance is common among SOME African lines of descent, but not others, and is shared among many Asian cultures. (The common denominator is whether the ancestral culture domesticate cattle or not, and if so, whether dairy also developed). It is when we bundle black skin up with a lot of totally imaginary assumptions, and a few real differences that actually vary, that we are off base.

Maybe women with the best characteristics for bearing health children were most likely to die in the Middle Passage? More likely, those women who turned out lots of babies were more likely to survive within a slave economy than those who had one baby every few years. The former would have been “mated” more readily, while the latter would have been worked to death before having many babies, if any. Thus, genes for lots of babies, with lower survival rates, would have come to dominate.
JonF says:

October 17, 2011 at 7:26 pm

Siarlys,
Cattle were domesticated throughout the Old World civilizations including in Africa. There was however a difference between people who also used cattle for dairy goods, and those who used them for meat, hide, and as work animals (the latter generally called oxen, although they are the same species originally as our dairy cows)
Mitchell Young says:

October 17, 2011 at 8:33 pm

“Given the history of racism — including the part that most progressives leave out: the progressive enthusiasm for eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — people are quite right to be very, very nervous about these discussions.”

For a long time now I’ve thought this was a strange argument. After all, the communists killed far far more people that the Nazis, and engaged in mass murder more recently (see Cambodia or China) but few to no one has a problem with class analyses of social problems. People are almost required to support ‘free trade’ yet there is a pretty good argument the free trade ideology led directly to, and helped prolong, the Irish famine.
Mitchell Young says:

October 17, 2011 at 8:39 pm

Siarlys

Lactose tolerance (intolerance is the more normal state) arose separately in East Africans and Northern Europeans, and are indeed two distinct mutations.
===
Tishkoff’s study appears to have solved that mystery. By resequencing DNA samples that her team collected from a number of different ethnic groups in remote regions of Africa and testing whether genetic variation is associated with the ability to digest lactose, Tishkoff discovered that, indeed, a distinct genetic mutation to allow digestion of milk occurred in Africa independently from the European mutation and arose at the time that African populations started raising cattle.
====
http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/sociss/release.cfm?ArticleID=1376
Conradg says:

October 17, 2011 at 8:45 pm

Genetics do matter. Black people obviously have a much higher rate of sickle cell anemia due to genetics. And black people often respond differently to various kinds of medications also. Tailoring medical treatment to the subtle genetic differences in human beings is important, not just at the racial level, but at the individual level. It would be important to study this issue from a purely genetic and medical viewpoint, to see what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to be a cultural or even economic problem entirely. It would be good to figure out what it is.
JonF says:

October 17, 2011 at 9:29 pm

Mitchell Young,
Communism had far longer in which to work its wickedness. If Hitler had had a run of 70 years one shudders to think what his death toll might have been.

And class analysis is at least partly true (note: I am not saying Marx got everything right!), while “scientific racism” has about as much acquaintance with reality as astrology or the stuff you find in a Young Earth Creationist Institute.
Noah says:

October 17, 2011 at 10:36 pm

JonF,

“Communism had far longer in which to work its wickedness.”

Yes and no. Mass murder was not spread evenly over the history of the USSR. The bloodiest years by far were from the October Revolution until the Second World War. For example, 3-8 million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death in the space of less than two years (1932-3). The most intense period of tyranny in China, the Cultural Revolution, lasted only about ten years. The murderous Khmer Rouge regime lasted a mere four years.

“If Hitler had had a run of 70 years one shudders to think what his death toll might have been.”

Germany in the 1940′s lacked the population and industrial base to conquer the world, or even all of Europe. The Germans couldn’t even launch a land invasion of Britain. Before the invasion of Normany, Germany was at best at a stalemate in Europe, and would have eventually collapsed trying to occupy western Europe while fighting a hopeless war of attrition with the Soviets.

Nazi ideology was not going to win converts the world over. Who besides a German might be attracted to extreme German nationalism?

“‘scientific racism’ has about as much acquaintance with reality as astrology or the stuff you find in a Young Earth Creationist Institute.”

What do you mean by scientific racism? It is not racist to note that there are genetic differences, rooted in evolution, between geographically separated racial and ethnic groups (any more than it is misogynist to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes). People who say that race is a myth or a “social construct” in academic-speak are the ones unacquainted with reality.
meh says:

October 17, 2011 at 11:18 pm

How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?
by Steve Sailer
May 8,2002

Is mixed race ancestry fairly typical for an American? In two ways, it is. First, more than 50 million whites, according to his analyses, have at least one black ancestor.

Another way to approach the question is to group together all the whites and blacks in America and calculate their mean degree of admixture. Shriver’s data shows that on average, they would be about 12 or 13 percent African.

Yet, from another perspective, a sizable degree of racial mixing is highly unusual. There simply aren’t many African-Americans or European-Americans who are mostly white but also substantially black. Shriver pointed out, “There is a very small degree of overlap in the population distributions.” In America, most of the whites are extremely European and most of the blacks are quite African.

Despite the notorious arbitrariness of the “one drop” rule, the actual American population conforms to its strictures surprisingly closely.

Granted, the “one drop” rule would be laughed out of existence if anyone attempted to impose it on a land with a more genetically blended population, such as Puerto Rico (which Shriver has begun to study). Yet, it appears possible that the rule survives in the U.S. because it’s not too wildly inaccurate. Only a small fraction of the population is more than half, but less than 90 percent European.

Among self-identified whites in Shriver’s sample, the average black admixture is only 0.7 percent. That’s the equivalent of having among your 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (who lived around two centuries ago), 127 whites and one black.

It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancestors. Among the 30 percent who do, the black admixture is around 2.3 percent, which would be like having about three black ancestors out of those 128.

In contrast, African-Americans are much more racially mixed than European-Americans. Yet, Shriver’s study shows that they are less European that was previously believed.

Earlier, cruder studies, done before direct genetic testing was feasible, suggested that African-Americans were 25 or even 30 percent white. Shriver’s project is not complete, but with data from 25 sites already in, he is coming up with 17-18 percent white ancestry among African-Americans. That’s the equivalent of 106 of those 128 of your ancestors from seven generations ago having been Africans and 22 Europeans.

According to Shriver, only about 10 percent of African-Americans are over 50 percent white.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 18, 2011 at 5:37 pm

JonF: Tell me something I didn’t already say.

Mitchell: It is quite plausible, even likely, that the adaptation to lactose tolerance after the age of six months or so arose independently. After all, cattle were independently domesticated in Africa. This confirms that it is not about “race,” but about domestication of cattle. Along the same lines, Australian aborigines have a different genetic pattern for dark skin color than west Africans.

Conradg: Of course there are differences, and the differences should be studied as such. There are also differences between Poles and Indians, between Vietnamese and South Americans, and differences WITHIN each of these demographics. Any given characteristic will overlap in different ways from any other given characteristic.

meh: Shriver is interesting, but I wonder how large a sample it would take to be certain of the conclusions. A friend of mine, definitely “black” by American standards, recently learned through genetic testing that his male genes are Irish or Spanish in origin. These genes, of course, once introduced into the y-chromosome inheritance, continue in the male line almost indefinitely. I would suspect the data required to establish anything with precision would be enormous. That there is a good deal of mixing is beyond dispute.