Question for people who know science.
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Question for people who know science.
I know that race is a social construct. The fact that I'm 'Black' has no meaning beyond my melanin levels. It doesn't, for instance, make me a better rapper than you. Culture might, but melanin doesn't.
So why are there medical differences between races? Black women have more fibroids, & have their babies a week earlier than white women. And Black men are more prone to type 2 diabetes.
Why's that? Culture? Racism? Something else?
@davidnjoku the answer to this can be found in My Grandmother's Hands, a book on intergenerational trauma
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@davidnjoku clustering of genetic traits is often random, sometimes interdependent, & can be rapid. One example I was taught about "founder effects" is that cheetahs have very little genetic diversity since the species survived a recent apocalypse. Then Jews in America have a much higher genetic risk of contracting kaposi's sarcoma, an otherwise rare cancer. Or how certain west Africans are at risk to sickle cell anaemia. Less about ethnicity than that ethnicities historically didn't intermarry.
@GavinChait That makes sense. About a quarter of all Nigerians have the sickle cell trait. Other African countries, not so much.
So it's just a useful shorthand to say something like sickle cell affects Black people? Instead of it affects people from the mosquito-infected rainforests near the equator?
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Question for people who know science.
I know that race is a social construct. The fact that I'm 'Black' has no meaning beyond my melanin levels. It doesn't, for instance, make me a better rapper than you. Culture might, but melanin doesn't.
So why are there medical differences between races? Black women have more fibroids, & have their babies a week earlier than white women. And Black men are more prone to type 2 diabetes.
Why's that? Culture? Racism? Something else?
@davidnjoku
I think the racism (and sexism) has direct and indirect effects resulting in poorer/later treatment and in less testing to determine the underlying causes -
Question for people who know science.
I know that race is a social construct. The fact that I'm 'Black' has no meaning beyond my melanin levels. It doesn't, for instance, make me a better rapper than you. Culture might, but melanin doesn't.
So why are there medical differences between races? Black women have more fibroids, & have their babies a week earlier than white women. And Black men are more prone to type 2 diabetes.
Why's that? Culture? Racism? Something else?
@davidnjoku @PurpleJillybeans I’ve thought about this a LOT, and I have zero answers for you. Even more fascinating to me is that are some medical markers only in African Americans. How did that happen in the last 600 years?
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@davidnjoku I was going to write about haplogroups, but your other reply made me think about impressions of medical commonality despite underlying genetic diversity ...
How has the diaspora affected that diversity? Do French Black people and British Black people share the same percentage of medical predispositions? How does that compare to the Americas?
Is there any noticeable difference between populations descending from colonial emigration and those who suffered forced relocation?
@alltherum Haven't thought about that, but that would be a very interesting thing to find out. I don't know for sure, but I imagine that a good proportion of the Black people in the Netherlands come from South Africa and from Suriname, and not as many from Nigeria and Ghana as in the UK. What difference does that make, I wonder?
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Question for people who know science.
I know that race is a social construct. The fact that I'm 'Black' has no meaning beyond my melanin levels. It doesn't, for instance, make me a better rapper than you. Culture might, but melanin doesn't.
So why are there medical differences between races? Black women have more fibroids, & have their babies a week earlier than white women. And Black men are more prone to type 2 diabetes.
Why's that? Culture? Racism? Something else?
@davidnjoku i should have read the thread first
very interesting stuff -
@davep That's a good point. But there are a billion Black people, and we're genetically more diverse than all of the rest of the world put together, so it's a bit strange (to my non-scientific mind) that there'll be traits that affect all of us.
@davidnjoku I can't really talk about these traits, as I don't know enough about that. But are you sure they affect black people (globally) or just African Americans? Because that's a huge difference if you consider genetic diversity. And then social factors come into play as well additionally.
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@davidnjoku @PurpleJillybeans I’ve thought about this a LOT, and I have zero answers for you. Even more fascinating to me is that are some medical markers only in African Americans. How did that happen in the last 600 years?
@topher1kenobe I didn't know that about African Americans. That's just crazy.
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@davidnjoku I can't really talk about these traits, as I don't know enough about that. But are you sure they affect black people (globally) or just African Americans? Because that's a huge difference if you consider genetic diversity. And then social factors come into play as well additionally.
@weddige I don't know.
When I lived in Nigeria, no one talked about things like that, cos we were all Black. But here in the UK, we do hear about the differences between the races a fair amount.
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@alltherum Haven't thought about that, but that would be a very interesting thing to find out. I don't know for sure, but I imagine that a good proportion of the Black people in the Netherlands come from South Africa and from Suriname, and not as many from Nigeria and Ghana as in the UK. What difference does that make, I wonder?
@davidnjoku In the States, the big concern is heart disease and infant mortality. There's been a great deal of research done concluding that, in those cases, it very specifically is racism-related. Specifically, systemically induced stress.
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Question for people who know science.
I know that race is a social construct. The fact that I'm 'Black' has no meaning beyond my melanin levels. It doesn't, for instance, make me a better rapper than you. Culture might, but melanin doesn't.
So why are there medical differences between races? Black women have more fibroids, & have their babies a week earlier than white women. And Black men are more prone to type 2 diabetes.
Why's that? Culture? Racism? Something else?
@davidnjoku AFAIK the diabetes thing specifically came from a sample that looked exclusively at black US americans which is a genetically much more homogenous group that black people in general. You see those kind of medical differences show up along all kinds of endogenic groups, 'race' just happens to line up with that.
(And also, sometimes whites are just the odd ones out and it's actually not black people have more X but rather white people have *less* X.) -
@GavinChait That makes sense. About a quarter of all Nigerians have the sickle cell trait. Other African countries, not so much.
So it's just a useful shorthand to say something like sickle cell affects Black people? Instead of it affects people from the mosquito-infected rainforests near the equator?
@davidnjoku pretty much. Sickle cell even reduces malaria effects, so there's an advantage to having it that happens to come with a lot of negatives.
The challenge with ethnicity-associated disease is that it's correlated with other things. People who all migrated from the same village & brought with them an otherwise rare condition. Or a regional genetic survival trait that becomes harmful as conditions change. Just because it is common within an ethnicity doesn't mean •everyone• is effected.
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@davidnjoku In the States, the big concern is heart disease and infant mortality. There's been a great deal of research done concluding that, in those cases, it very specifically is racism-related. Specifically, systemically induced stress.
@alltherum Yes, that happens here too, but to a lesser extent, I believe.
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@davidnjoku @davep maybe that's the moment to bring someone like @mekkaokereke into the discussion
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@davidnjoku @davep maybe that's the moment to bring someone like @mekkaokereke into the discussion
Great questions!
The short answer is that things like having babies a week earlier doesn't affect Black people more. It doesn't. It affects *Black people from a tiny part of West Africa* more.
Medical textbooks tested Black American people who are almost all West African (Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana) or southwestern African (Angola).
They just say that Black people have this, ignoring the fact that most of the human genetic diversity on earth is in Africa.
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Question for people who know science.
I know that race is a social construct. The fact that I'm 'Black' has no meaning beyond my melanin levels. It doesn't, for instance, make me a better rapper than you. Culture might, but melanin doesn't.
So why are there medical differences between races? Black women have more fibroids, & have their babies a week earlier than white women. And Black men are more prone to type 2 diabetes.
Why's that? Culture? Racism? Something else?
I think diet is a lot of it. Trad foods of every culture carry various benefits - and detriments. Animal fats, bread & corn meal...
Diabetes is a tricky one. The corporate controlled medical establishments tells diabetics they can keep on eating carbs when they should avoid all carbs like the plague.
And men avoid doctors.
Yes, there is absolutely a big problem with racists who go into medical care to get rich or have stable jobs, and not because they want to help people.
YMMV
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@davidnjoku pretty much. Sickle cell even reduces malaria effects, so there's an advantage to having it that happens to come with a lot of negatives.
The challenge with ethnicity-associated disease is that it's correlated with other things. People who all migrated from the same village & brought with them an otherwise rare condition. Or a regional genetic survival trait that becomes harmful as conditions change. Just because it is common within an ethnicity doesn't mean •everyone• is effected.
@davidnjoku also, imagine a founder effect... An initial group of Nigerians arrive in the UK & - this is where racism comes in - Britain is its normal, welcoming self, so the Nigerians form their own community. New Africans arrive from elsewhere on the continent & look for somewhere welcoming. The Nigerian community becomes a pan-African community. A few generations later & a Nigerian-Malian has sickle cell. Apply that to any other relatively distinct group of migrants & off you go.
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Question for people who know science.
I know that race is a social construct. The fact that I'm 'Black' has no meaning beyond my melanin levels. It doesn't, for instance, make me a better rapper than you. Culture might, but melanin doesn't.
So why are there medical differences between races? Black women have more fibroids, & have their babies a week earlier than white women. And Black men are more prone to type 2 diabetes.
Why's that? Culture? Racism? Something else?
@davidnjoku I honestly don't know if this counts as "knowing science", so please feel free to disregard this reply if it does not. But for what it's worth I inhabit a culture that actively rejects the term "Rasse", when applied to people, as unscientific. If you read German (or have access to a good translator, human or machine), perhaps you find this Wikipedia article insightful.
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@topher1kenobe I didn't know that about African Americans. That's just crazy.
@davidnjoku @PurpleJillybeans yeah, I’m trying to remember something I read on the internet 20 years ago, so do NOT quote me, but I think African American men have a higher incidence of heart disease. So that’s a pretty specific group. I’m really curious why.
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Great questions!
The short answer is that things like having babies a week earlier doesn't affect Black people more. It doesn't. It affects *Black people from a tiny part of West Africa* more.
Medical textbooks tested Black American people who are almost all West African (Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana) or southwestern African (Angola).
They just say that Black people have this, ignoring the fact that most of the human genetic diversity on earth is in Africa.
️Do "Black" people have higher BMI? Due to higher bone density and higher skeletal muscle mass? Or do Asian people? Is that why Black people are over represented in the NFL?
The answer of course depends on which Black people and which Asian people we are talking about.
Asian people are *the most* overrepresented in the NFL, and it's not remotely close. The strongest *officially measured* NFL player is Asian. Stephen Paea. The strongest *unofficially measured* NFL player is West African. Larry Allen.
Think of how silly it would be to use Stephen Paea, Haloti Ngata, and Troy Polumalu as samples, and infer population characteristics for every Chinese citizen. That's what US medical textbooks making predictions about "Black" people do to all Africans.
mekka okereke :verified: (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)
Attached: 3 images Now I need you to understand something before we go further: Race isn't real. Racism is. "Black" people have naturally higher BMI. I put Black in scare quotes, because the 1.5 billion Black people don't have higher BMI. Black people *from a tiny part of West Africa* have higher BMI.🙋🏿♂️ Just like white people from a tiny part (Iceland) have higher BMI. Just like Asian people from a tiny part (Samoa). Every "race" has a tiny population with slightly more height, denser bones, and more muscle.
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
