[GAME] Guess the word!

One
might think that slaveholders, looking out for their bottom line, would
be interested in ensuring at least a modicum of restful slumber for
their enslaved workers. The social reformer Thomas Tryon made this
argument in 1684 when he wrote of “inconsiderate masters” who compel the
enslaved to work so hard that they were often so “overcome with
weariness and want of proper Rest” that they would “fall into the fierce
boyling Syrups” of the sugar pots. Ensuring proper rest, he wrote,
“would add much to their Profit” as well as to the slaves’ health.

Yet
just as often, slaveholders justified overwork and minimal rest as a
positive good, in the process elaborating curious theories about the
supposed natural differences between the races.

Thomas Jefferson,
for instance, opined that black people simply “require less sleep” than
whites. And while he noted enslaved people’s propensity to drop off
quickly at the end of a long day, he convinced himself that a rapid
descent into sleep was evidence of inferior intellects (rather than
insufficient rest). White people, he observed, could keep themselves up
late into the night to pursue intellectual or creative endeavors,
whereas “negroes” were deficient in the powers of “reflection” that
allowed them to do so: “An animal whose body is at rest, and who does
not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.”

Louisiana
physician Samuel Cartwright, who conducted a widely disseminated study
of the medical condition of slaves, also believed that differences in
sleeping were evidence of the natural supremacy of the white race. He
claimed that black people at rest instinctively smothered their own
faces with blankets or clothing, impeding the flow of oxygen to the
brain, and that this obstruction permanently stunted their intellectual
development. As for slaves who wandered exhausted across the plantation,
he considered this a special kind of black-people disease known as “dysaesthesia aethiopica.” The cure, Cartwright counseled, was “hard work in the open air” and increased discipline on the part of the slaveholders.

The
killing labors, constant anxiety and wretched sleeping conditions of
slavery no doubt produced chronic fatigue, and yet Jefferson and
Cartwright perversely identified exhaustion as the problem and hard work
as the cure. Such cures were often administered at the end of a whip.
As Frederick Douglass put it in his memoir, “More slaves were whipped
for oversleeping than for any other fault.” Douglass went as far as to
suggest that keeping the enslaved population in a state of constant
fatigue was a useful tool in breaking their will. He wrote that, on
Sundays, he regularly found himself “in a beast-like state, between
sleep and wake” that made it impossible for him to act on the “flash of
energetic freedom [that] would dart through my soul.” Sinking back to
the ground, he would simply mourn over his “wretched condition.”

What
remains of this history is a profound confusion as to the causes and
effects of our racial inequalities. Out of Jefferson and Cartwright’s
pseudo-scientific racism, the stereotype of the “lazy black man” was
given medical legitimacy: Exhaustion was seen as a character trait
requiring more hard work, rather than an effect of a fractured sleeping
environment and extreme physical and emotional duress.

To this
day, opportunities for sound sleep are distributed unequally among the
races, while the effects of such disparities are frequently
misidentified. For example, minority students who perform poorly on
tests, appear apathetic or act out in school are often blamed for lack
of will or poor values, when in fact they may be irritable, depressed,
or unfocused in large part because they’re tired and stressed. An
ongoing study by psychologist Tiffany Yip of Fordham University examines
the joint effects of ethnic discrimination and sleep deprivation on
African American and Latino youth; her preliminary findings suggest a
vicious cycle in which experiences of discrimination lead to poor sleep,
which in turn leads to higher levels of anxiety, lower engagement in
school and deepening problems of self-esteem.

Some pediatricians, psychologists and public health advocates
are beginning to understand that detection, prevention and treatment of
poor sleep is an important aspect of improving the educational
performance of socioeconomically disadvantaged children. Little public
attention, however, is given to the more pervasive problem of unequal
sleeping conditions that is borne of our troublesome racial history.

Slave
quarters are now tourist attractions, but the descendants of enslaved
Africans are still more likely than whites to live in inhospitable
sleeping environments. As public health scholar Lauren Hale points out,
African Americans tend to live in noisier and more dangerous urban
environments than whites; such environments may lead to shorter and
shallower sleep. African Americans are also more likely to have
undesirable or unpredictable work schedules than whites, which leads to
chaotic sleep schedules. Increased risk of hunger as well as fear of
violence or of harassment by police make a good night’s sleep even
harder to obtain.

Langston Hughes
described American slavery as “the rock on which/Freedom stumped its
toe.” As we attempt to address the inequities of wealth, education,
health and incarceration that persist across the color line, we would do
well to remember that these problems were formed by night as well as by
day. If we want to close that gap, we’ll have to confront Hughes’
stubborn rock, which for too many serves in place of a pillow.

Benjamin Reiss, a professor of English at Emory University, is the author most recently of “Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World.” He wrote previously for Opinion on why we make children sleep alone.