Question for people who know science.
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@davidnjoku The same reason I have less melanin, for example. Some genetic traits just go with the territory, like ginger hair.
@davidnjoku And e.g. both northern European and Saudi people independently developed lactose tolerance into adulthood.
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@davidnjoku And e.g. both northern European and Saudi people independently developed lactose tolerance into adulthood.
@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.
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@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 True. Maybe there are genetic traits that developed as we went into the frozen north where such innate traits were more of an issue? Not sure, tbh.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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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 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.
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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 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?
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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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