BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Racial Oppression is Why Black Men Are Missing!

by KenRay SunYaRu

“To a great extent, the personality of the African-American today has been shaped by our desires to escape the memory of the slave experience, to deny its existence. We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to come to terms with it. We don’t want to re-experience it psychologically. And therefore, our lives become defined by eternal escape and avoidance of reality and of history and of knowledge of who we are and how we came to be who and what we are. And consequently, we cannot act upon the reality of our history and we therefore guide our behavior and define ourselves in terms of a fantasy as history, and a misinterpretation of reality.” – Dr. Amos Wilson

Having awareness of Black history through deep study as a Black man, I understand clearly that the force removal of Black men ‘intentional repression and causative premature medical mortalities’ has been and is an integral aspect of America’s institutional racism.

Regarding Black men on slave plantations, historians cite that Black men were constantly sold and relocated ‘removed’ from their families due to their high value. Historians also cite that Black male slaves were removed due to health-related deaths, citing that sixty-two percent of slave deaths occurred in the male population.

Indeed, Black male salve departures due to ‘sales and sicknesses’ left a prevalence of single mothers and children on plantations; male children were also frequently taken from slave mothers. When you look at the mass removal of Black men and boys from their families and communities today it’s no different from the days of our Ancestors enslavement.

Current research shows that in hundreds of predominantly Black neighborhoods in the U.S. there are only about three Black men for every five black women under age 65. This disproportionate gender imbalance reflects factors including mass incarceration and high mortality.

According to figures from the ‘Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Black males are imprisoned in state and federal facilities at six times the rate of white men, and about 25 times that of Black women. Regarding Black male youth ‘children’ research shows they are almost five times as likely as their white male peers to be held in juvenile facilities.

Many Blacks have been led to believe that the single biggest driver behind the absence of many Black men is mass incarceration, but this is not the case at all! According to Nina T. Harawa a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California Los Angeles and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, states that:

“A common, but misleading, narrative about the Black family is that it is broken - fractured by wayward and self-destructive Black men who have gone missing, either dead or in prison. This supposed breakdown of the Black family has been blamed for any number of ills, from high school dropout rates to entrenched poverty. The reality, however, is that while bullets, prison bars, and criminal injustice do pull too many men from the arms of their partners and children, Black men who “follow the rules,” hold a steady job, and advance from young adulthood into middle age will still face systemic threats to their health and wellbeing. Many chronic diseases hit Black men harder, younger, and more frequently than they do other groups. Homicide does not even crack the top eight causes of death for Black men in middle-age, but each year, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and diabetes collectively shave off nearly one and a half years of life for every 100 Black men under the age of 65 - more than twice their toll on White men.”

To Black women, many of you all raise the question where are the Black men at? Many of you all say they are in prison – dating or marrying white women. No! The main reason Black men are missing is because they are in the ‘cemetery’ due to dying prematurely ‘disproportionately’ from chronic diseases.

Studying our history as Black folks shows us clearly from past to present that the removal ‘absence’ of Black men from their families and communities has been due to the pathologies and deadliness of white racist oppression.

Black History Month: A Black Man's Oath

 

Black Men Are Dying More From Sleep Apnea

*Study finds racial disparities in sleep apnea mortality

By Ellen Goldbaum

A University of Buffalo (UB) study has found that over the past two decades, more Black men have been dying from obstructive sleep apnea than have white people or Black females. Their death from sleep apnea has continued to rise, in contrast to rates that have flattened for white people and Black females.

The study identifies for the first time this significant racial health disparity in mortality resulting from sleep apnea. It was published online in February in Sleep Medicine.

“Despite several epidemiologic studies focusing on the prevalence, risk factors and clinical presentations of sleep apnea, no study, to our knowledge, has evaluated the disparity of sleep apnea-related mortality among different racial groups,” says Yu-Che Lee, first author and a medical resident in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, who sees patients through the Catholic Health System. 

“We therefore brought up an idea to do the research discussing the difference of sleep apnea-related mortality and mortality trends from 1999 to 2019 between Black and white Americans.”

To conduct the study, the researchers examined sleep apnea-related mortality for the years 1999-2019 from the National Center for Health Statistics, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sleep apnea is the most common sleep-related breathing disorder and has been associated with development of systemic hypertension, cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, and abnormalities in glucose metabolism.

Lee and his colleagues found a steady increase in mortality from the years 1999 to 2008, but then the rates flattened for Black females and for white males and females. That flattening suggests that medical management and public health interventions have helped stabilize outcomes in these groups.

Black males were the only group that saw a continuous increase in mortality from sleep apnea for the 21 years of the study.

Truly Concerning

“Our study showed that Black men were the only demographic group to have a continuous sleep apnea mortality increase in the last 10 years, which is truly concerning,” Lee says.

A combination of factors, including compliance with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines, likely contribute to this continuous increase in sleep apnea mortality among Black men, the researchers say.

“The literature suggests that compliance with CPAP is lower in patients who are Black, are of lower socioeconomic class and may have lower health literacy,” says M. Jeffery Mador, associate professor in the Department of Medicine in the Jacobs School and a study co-author, who sees patients through UBMD Internal Medicine.

“It is extremely likely that deaths occurred because the subjects were untreated or poorly compliant with therapy,” Mador continues. “CPAP therapy is highly effective and very few deaths, if any, would be expected if the subjects were adequately treated, followed and were able to use the therapy.”

He adds that clinicians may have opportunities to help. “We have noticed that there is room for improvement in terms of optimizing CPAP usage in our own patients who display the above factors,” he says.

Another striking finding in the study was what the researchers saw as “remarkable” geographic differences in mortality from sleep apnea. The highest age-adjusted mortality rates were seen in the Midwest for both genders in Black and white people, while the lowest mortality rates were seen among Black males in the West and Black females and white males and females in the Northeast.

Among states, the highest age-adjusted mortality rate from sleep apnea for Black people was recorded in Indiana, while Utah had the highest mortality rate for white people. New York had the lowest mortality rates for Black and white people.

An Underdiagnosed Problem

“Sleep apnea is relatively underdiagnosed in the general population, but this problem may be greater in Black patients,” Mador says.

“Even when diagnosed, successful treatment is lower in Black people than the general population,” he adds. “Untreated sleep apnea is associated with higher levels of hypertension, heart disease, stroke and diabetes, all of which are common in Black patients. Hopefully, increasing awareness and improving efficacy of treatment may lead to better health outcomes in this patient population.”

“This is the first study to demonstrate the disparities of sleep apnea-related mortality and different mortality trends between Black and white Americans,” Lee says. “These findings should give clinicians some insights into the problem to develop more tailored strategies and treatments to reduce racial disparities in outcomes from sleep apnea.”