October 15, 2011

Black infant mortality

The NYT writes
Precisely why the black infant mortality rate is so high is a mystery that has eluded researchers even as the racial disparity continues to grow in cities like Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Boston. 
In Pittsburgh, where the unemployment rate is well below the national average, the infant mortality rate for black residents of Allegheny County was 20.7 in 2009, a slight decrease from 21 in 2000 but still worse than the rates in China or Mexico. In the same period the rate among whites in the county decreased to 4 from 5.6 — well below the national average, according to state statistics. ...

And the article goes on, in the standard fashion, to talk about the black-white gap from various perspectives. 
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.

My guess would be that the differences would be part nature, part nurture. The nature side looks to me like at base, an r-K differential. The nurture side, however, needs investigating because matters could be improved. For example, what is the role of STDs?

The problem with most conventional thinking about racial differences is what I call the midget-giant gestalt issue, after the time when I was at UCLA and I saw a midget talking to a normal sized guy. But then a second midget walked up and I suddenly realized the midgets were six-footers and the normal sized guy was 7'-4" 290 pound basketball player Mark Eaton. 

Similarly, American race discourse is obsessed with black-white comparisons, which often don't get very far for lack of a third party to provide perspective. 

Thus, a table accompanying the article shows that the infant mortality rate among Hispanics is slightly lower than among whites, much less among blacks. (Click on the table above to see more columns.) That poor Hispanics have much, much lower infant mortality than poor blacks is not a new development.  I noticed that back in the early 1990s. But there is no reference in this 2011 article to Hispanics. You would think that this would be a key avenue of research because Hispanics have, evidently, found cheap ways to have healthy babies.

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? 

92 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder why the SIDS rate of Hispanics and Asians is about half that of whites. Younger mothers?

Jacob Roberson said...

So how are Indians doing? Don't see them on the graph, below Hispanics and above Black people I guess?

Perspective said...

"wonder why the SIDS rate of Hispanics and Asians is about half that of whites. Younger mothers?"

Many Asians (atleast North East Asians),tend to have children late in life for similar reasons that whites do though.

Anonymous said...

Of course, a significant number of Hispanics have African ancestry (Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Venezuelans). The reporter should look up statistics on blacks in other countries.

Anonymous said...

What is "an r-K differential"?

Anonymous said...

not when those successes highlight black failure we aren't.

Anonymous said...

Why are comparisons about anything to do with blacks always against whites? Why is it always whites -blacks? Why can't other groups be used for comparison aginst this dysfunctional race?

Anonymous said...

On a concurrent topic, the whole Back to Sleep campaign that was instituted to prevent SIDs ticks me off. Two of my three children ended up with flattened heads because of this. When I looked up the stats on SIDs several years ago approximately 5,000 children a year died of it before Back to Sleep and now about 3,500 children do. However, MILLIONS of children now have some form of plagiocephaly (flattened heads).

Jehu said...

Is there a geographic differential in the US? Specifically based on how sunny-friendly to vitamin D manufacturing the area's climate is?

I ask because I know quite a few people from Southern India in my area and a few blacks as well who have strict orders from their physicians to take 2000-5000 IU/day of vitamin D for reasons of inflammation or deficiency (I live in the Pacific Northwest where it is pretty grey 6 months of the year).

Anonymous said...

"I wonder why the SIDS rate of Hispanics and Asians is about half that of whites. Younger mothers?"

Among Asians and Mexicans at least--who are racially related, btw--, it could be the females are mellower than among blacks--who be crazy--and whites--some of whom are crack whore trash.

Anonymous said...

So how are Indians doing? Don't see them on the graph, below Hispanics and above Black people I guess?

Casino Indians or Call-Center Indians?

I wonder why the SIDS rate of Hispanics and Asians is about half that of whites.

Asian and Hispanic women are feminine creatures who love their babies and cuddle them close in bed with them. Cuddled babies very seldom suffocate. White and black women regard babies as a burden in the way of their masculine ambitions and put their babies into padded cells to sleep where they sometimes get into knots their unformed baby limbs can't escape and they die.

What is "an r-K differential"?

Let me Google that for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

In short, some species prefer to have lots of kids and invest little in them hoping some fraction will survive to produce grandchildren even without investment. Other species nurture every one of their small number of offspring fully in the hopes that each one will survive to reproduce.

how sunny-friendly to vitamin D manufacturing the area's climate is?

And more importantly, who is drinking sugary soda pop exclusively instead of milk.

Geoff Matthews said...

Hey, I have a flattened head. But given that I'm not balding (and at 41, probably won't approach that until I'm in my 60s), I don't care.
I have a son who, while an infant, insisted on cramming his face into the crib pads, and this scared my wife. Until, after 3 weeks of it, she figured that he'd be okay.

Anonymous said...

Doctor friend years ago believed many SIDS cases = infanticide...

Maya said...

Maternal complications are higher in white women than in Hispanic and Asian. Is that because Whites are so much more likely to be into New Age/hippie crap?

Maya said...

"Doctor friend years ago believed many SIDS cases = infanticide..."

I've heard that opinion expressed many times by both doctors and social workers, always in hushed tones. Is there any way to come anywhere close to finding out?

Maya said...

Also, I find it very strange that there is no subdivision for accidental deaths. I personally know two families that lost infants. One baby drowned, and the other fell.

Maya said...

"Asian and Hispanic women are feminine creatures who love their babies and cuddle them close in bed with them. Cuddled babies very seldom suffocate. White and black women regard babies as a burden in the way of their masculine ambitions and put their babies into padded cells to sleep where they sometimes get into knots their unformed baby limbs can't escape and they die."

East Asian women are VERY career oriented. The SIDS thing might be explained by mongoloid genetics. Still, a part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe Hispanic and Asian people are a lot more defined by their children than the other presented races, and thus are less likely to kill them.

Si said...

Why do I never see this linked too?

"At present rates of fertility and mortality and in the absence of changes within countries, the average IQ of the young world population would decline by 1.34 points per decade and the average per capita income would decline by 0.79% per year."

Permanent recession stemming from a dysgenic society and possibly defaults by the West borrowing so much because we're unable to accept this decline?

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=5794948

Simon in London said...

I think us whites should be concerned our "sudden infant death syndrome" rate is TWICE that of Hispanics, just as the black rate is twice that of others. Clearly blacks are doing lots of things wrong - but there are things we appear to be doing wrong, too.

c23 said...

Another racial gap: redditor who is a TA at college audited papers submitted by a class of 60, and found that all of the black students, and only the black students had plagiarized badly enough to get caught. Hand-wringing ensues.

medea said...

"Clearly blacks are doing lots of things wrong - but there are things we appear to be doing wrong, too."

ASSuming this is related to maternal behavior rather than say allergies or asthma which blacks seem to have to a greater degree than anyone else.

medea said...

blah, blah, blah..." Mark Eaton."

It's embarrassing when you name drop, Sailer. Worse when it's recycled material. I'm not even gonna bother to look this one up figuring he'll remind me of that cro mag looking guy who married the Armenian chick last month.

c23 said...

Uh, here's the link to the aforementioned reddit thread.

I think it needs a little love from the iSteve crowd.

Anonymous said...

I have no idea about this one Steve.
Perhaps it is genetically realated to black physiology, and as you said what role does the enormous rate of STD infection amongst blacks plays?
Perhaps a related point is the lack of parental care displayed by black children towards their children.For example, in England, local authority social services responsible for fostering/adopting children are absolutely inundated with black kids - to the point where there are kids of no other ethnicities being put up for adoption.We are talking of at least 95% black/mixed race children in local authority care.

jody said...

yeah, but i've talked about this before. it's the visibility principle. you have to be conspicuous to become a part of the "group x versus group y" psychology. if you're never really visually prominent, you can't enter the flow of consciousness.

europeans mostly outsprint and outjump anybody but black americans, but since those are the only 2 groups usually visible in most sports, there aren't many stereotypes about the other groups who are so much less capable person for person, that the best guy from the group can barely even get into the game.

so even though europeans generally steamroll every group but black americans in most sports, and can actually run pretty fast and jump pretty high, in the US at least, the sportcasters will forever be howling with glee about how slow white guys are and how they can't jump, while never saying anything about the other 4 or 5 groups since they're never even in the game and hence not visible.

LOL, i'll tell you, one comparison they never make along the standard european versus african metric is "number of programming languages created." in fact, 10 years ago, back when i kept hearing indians were good at computer science, and that plus cost was the logical reason to outsource all our IT jobs, i started looking for the evidence that south asians were unusually good at this stuff. and couldn't find it. boring, useless, dumb european gentiles, and a few ashkenazi jewish guys, were doing most of the important stuff in computer science while i was being told south asians were critical contributors.

so, RIP dennis ritchie, creator of C, the backbone of much of our current computer based society. also created UNIX, with fellow nerd ken thompson. hey, there's another one they never do: "number of operating systems created".

Anonymous said...

@Simon in London

Uh, it's probably that Asians and Hispanics are less likely to smother their kids in the crib.

90% of the time, SIDS = infanticide.

jody said...

the visibility principle is really important. it dominates the way liberals think about group inequities and is the source of their headcount method for lawsuits over the last 30 years. it dominates the way most identity politics work. various political leaders are highly concerned with the number of africans that appear in front of the camera on television and in movies. they care so much they'll even get into lawsuits over it. but they don't care much if africans are writing almost no scripts, are directing almost no productions, are handling almost no cinematography, are creating almost no effects, are composing almost none of the music. that is all much, much less visible, so it's something they notice less, and hence something they fight over less.

video games are even worse along these lines, with 1 or 2 groups creating almost everything, and the other 4 or 5 groups doing almost literally nothing, just consuming the final product. this angry birds game sweeping the world is the product of ultra boring, super uninteresting finns, while the 115 million vibrant mexicans have produced...?

the visibility principle even trips up scientists. that was what happened to rushton and lynn, 15 years ago when they could probably be considered the leading HBD researchers. they had created that incorrect idea about 3 human groups on a sliding scale of attributes, because they took the groups that were notable, that stood out, instead of doing a rigorous review of the actual various human groups around the world. most human groups are mediocre, rarely do anything remarkable, and just aren't that visible. so there they are, quietly existing, by the hundreds of millions, not being studied much. this is the future for americans in states where the immivasion is underway. instead of being dynamic and vibrant, things will be boring, static, and underwhelming.

you end up with these huge areas to study, like indonesia and bangladesh, were it's total radio silence from the HBD crowd (or any crowd, for that matter). there's like 400 million people in those 2 nations. that's like 60% the size of europe, with nothing coming out.

Anonymous said...

Could the problem have to do with the fact that many African Americans are racially mixed?

Yes, Hispanics are racially mixed too, but it's mostly White/Indian as opposed to Black/White. The genetic difference between Africans and non-Africans is greater than that between Eurasians and American Indians, and maybe there is some sort of genetic incompatibility that shows up as a low level of excess infant mortality. The obvious way to investigate this would be to look at racially mixed people in places like Brazil and see if you see the same pattern.

Simon in London said...

anon:
"@Simon in London

Uh, it's probably that Asians and Hispanics are less likely to smother their kids in the crib.

90% of the time, SIDS = infanticide."

I doubt it's 90%, given that 'back to sleep' alone close to halved the SIDS rate - but yes, that would be something we would be doing wrong!

On r-k, do whites have lower parental investment than Hispanic Mestizos, as well as east-Asians? My own experience as a white parent was that I was ridiculously over-fearful of my child dying; this probably contributed to keeping him alive, but also stressed me out and probably also contributed to me only having one child (it would also have helped if my wife had been willing to take more of a traditional maternal role).

Anonymous said...

"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?"

Hispanics don't have any money or health care infrastructure which can be redistributed in the name of "social justice." Indeed, Hispanics are coopting the Great Society medical welfare intended for negroes. So pointing out the black/brown disparities in infant mortality serves no politically useful purpose.

Clearly, whites should have budgeted for the additional medical costs of having themselves replaced by the mendicant races of Latin America. Now they must borrow heavily from the Chinese to care for the Mexican poor who waddle over the southern border, in addition to providing eternal reparations to blacks. Indeed, I forsee future legislation to appropriate the estates of all whites for a trust fund for black children. After all, why should the extinction of the white race absolve it from its moral obligation to support blacks. Mexicans will have to content themselves with digging up white corpses for dental gold.

Anonymous said...

Black women be more likely to do as they please and less likely to follow medical advice or even advice of friends and family members. She just be eating what she wants and doing what she wants.

Same with schooling. Why black kids such bad students? Cuz they do as they wants, and their parents just do as they wants. If teacher tries to give good advice to black parents, the sistaz not be listening but see it as nuisance.
Same with doctors. If doctors be giving good advice, black women done see it as just annoyance.

Anonymous said...

"Could the problem have to do with the fact that many African Americans are racially mixed?"

I doubt it. I bet the problem be bigger among darker blacks who be less intelligent and wilder.

medea said...

Your blog was so much more professional before the likes of Maya, Kylie, MQ and Wes took over.

DYork said...

But there is no reference in this 2011 article to Hispanics.

Sorry Steve but this article was about AMERICA. I know about America because I live here and more importantly I have watched American media for many decades.

So I'm well aware of the fact that there are no Hispanics or Asians in America.

America consists of Bad Whitey, Good Blacky and Good Whitey who is morally outraged about what Bad Whitey is doing to Good Blacky.

That's it.

Catperson said...

It's weird how when it comes to IQ Hispanics/Amerindians/arctic people score almost as low as African Americans, yet when it comes to other dimensions of Rushton's r/K racial theory (life span,infant mortality, rate of maturation, even brain size), they mostly seem like typical highly evolved recently emerged Mongoloids. Makes me wonder if the IQ tests are culturally biased against aboriginals both in the Americas and for that matter Australia (since Australian aboriginals score lower than most Africans in Africa despite being part of the more recently emerged non-African branch of humanity and despite being arguably archaic Caucasoid or tropical Mongoloids). On the other hand the IQ tests could be valid, but aboriginal Intelligence has been biologically impaired by invading whites who bring disease and alcohol that aboriginals can not handle genetically.

I also wonder about Ashkenazi Jews; they score higher than even east Asian Mongoloids despite being part of the mediocre Caucasoid race and related to the older more primitive caucasoids of the middle east and show certain primitive talents (they resemble blacks in their creativity in the pop cultural arts). Makes me wonder if their IQ's are also somehow influenced more by the environment than genetics. I know their evolutionary theories for high Ashkenazi IQ but it almost violates occam's razor to have a special explanation for certain groups; much better to try to fit everyone neatly into Rushton's simple elegant mongoloid ,Caucasoid, Negroid triarchy.

Anonymous said...

I doubt it's 90%, given that 'back to sleep' alone close to halved the SIDS rate

Correlation != Causation, remember?

The other posters are quite correct--SIDS is a myth, it is just the comforting myth our society has decided to adopt.

I would have thought that 40 years of legalized abortion would have empowered a certain segment of the population to start agitating for normalizing the post-partum version, but apparently that's a bridge even the most militant pro-aborts find too far.

Catperson said...

"At present rates of fertility and mortality and in the absence of changes within countries, the average IQ of the young world population would decline by 1.34 points per decade and the average per capita income would decline by 0.79% per year."

There's evidence that genetic intelligence has been declining for the past 20,000 years. I recently read an article claiming cranial capacity was bigger during caveman days even when you adjust for body size, however as social groups expanded, particularly with the advent of agriculture, dumber people could survive because of the extra resources and social safety net. And since r-K theory predicts dumber people breed more, a greater social safety net will have a dysgenic effect. However a greater social safety net will also provide good nutrition which will make everyone taller, bigger brained and smarter negating and even reversing the dysgenic effect (see the flynn effect) at least temporarily.

Rushton himself argues that r/K explains the rise and fall of civilization. K people build the civilization, but once it is built, selection pressures relax and the r people take over because of their prolific breeding causing the civilization to crumble and then the cycle repeats.

Catperson said...

the visibility principle even trips up scientists. that was what happened to rushton and lynn, 15 years ago when they could probably be considered the leading HBD researchers. they had created that incorrect idea about 3 human groups on a sliding scale of attributes, because they took the groups that were notable, that stood out,

Actually Lynn's book focuses on 10 races, it's Rushton who focuses on the big three. And actually a 2009 genetic study concluded that there are indeed only 3 genetic groups:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/21/AR2009062101726_pf.html

I like the 3 race model. You have an advanced race, a primitive race, and one race that's in between. It's elegant and symmetrical. Reminds me of the movie Quest for Fire. Has Steve ever reviewed that?

JSM said...

On r-k, do whites have lower parental investment than Hispanic Mestizos, as well as east-Asians? "My own experience as a white parent was that I was ridiculously over-fearful of my child dying; this probably contributed to keeping him alive, but also stressed me out and probably also contributed to me only having one child (it would also have helped if my wife had been willing to take more of a traditional maternal role)."

To reduce crib death, breastfeeding advocates have suggested:
Mother-baby cosleeping and night-nursing, lying together in a baby-safe bed in a tobacco-smoke-free room.

If mom's drunk or stoned, or excessively obese, put the baby to sleep in a crib til the cosleeping environment deficiencies are corrected.

But, wait. Black women are more likely to breastfeed and cosleep than White mothers. Yet they have higher SIDS rates.


They are also much more obese, as a group.

The conclusion is probably obvious to the iSteve crowd.

Amy P said...

"Assuming this is related to maternal behavior rather than say allergies or asthma which blacks seem to have to a greater degree than anyone else."

Right. The Vitamin D issue may be important, too.

European ancestry people in the US (especially in the North) are living in roughly the sort of geographic environment that our ancestors lived in in Europe. To live in a completely different latitude and environment may be problematic. (As a Northern European ancestry person living in Texas, I certainly have to take a lot of precautions to avoid burning like toast.)

Sheila said...

Re Anonymous ("Asian and Hispanic women are feminine creatures who cuddle their babies close . . . ") - you are either Asian or Hispanic or a male with yellow fever. I had my first child while posted in Asia. Contrary to your assertion, the women never held their babies; they were wheeled in once a day to be presented to visitors, and spent the rest of the time in the nursery. Almost none of the women had natural childbirth and even fewer nursed. One Asian woman I knew (in another Asian country) left her kids at the hospital the first few weeks so she could catch up on her sleep. Having an elective caesarian (to avoid the inconvenience or perceived negative effects of childbirth on one's figure) was common; so, too, was premature labor inducement or an early elective caesarian to ensure an "auspicious" birth day, month, or even year. Traditional Asian "natural medicine" believes that a mother risks arthritis or rheumatism if she bathes within a month (or is it 6 weeks?) of birth, the traditional (and still observed) period of "confinement."


The Asian babies I saw at the doctor's office or out shopping (there was only one in my birthing group, such was the pressure by mothers and grandmothers against natural childbirth) all had hand-mitts on until they were almost a year old (preventing them from scratching their faces was the reason given). These mitts also prevented the babies from tactile contact and cut off an important avenue of learning/exploring their world. The babies were also swaddled much of the time (limiting movement and exploration as well). Contrast this with the White mothers I knew (American, British, Australian, etc.) who almost all nursed, placed their children on blankets or the floor to explore, etc. FWIW, I believe White children generally walk earlier than Asians (and blacks before Whites).

As far as "back to sleep" and SIDS, I don't believe there is any connection. Any related drop in the SIDS rate was due to the effort, at the same time, to remove extraneous pillows and blankets from cribs. All the babies I cared for throughout the years, as well as my own, all slept on their stomachs. If there are any reliable statistics on SIDS in other countries, I'd be interested in seeing them. All the Arabs, Asians, and other non-Whites I knew placed their infants in cribs with pillows and lace and quilts and didn't seem to be concerned about the smothering danger. The back-to-sleep campaign has resulted in lots of kids with flattened heads and delayed motor skills and not much else. Just another campaign by "experts" ignoring Occam's Razor (I agree with other posters that an undetermined but large percentage of SIDS deaths are not accidental at all).

Nanonymous said...

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db74.htm#summary

More stats and more detailed ethnic breakdown here:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db74.htm#summary

Personally, I think that most of it is environmental. There must be some genetic differences but are probably small. Then again, the line between nature an nurture are blurred. E.g., high rates of STDs are caused by specific sexuality which is largely genetic.

Son of Brock Landers said...

Why only focus on the black-white split? All the better to guilt white readers. That's the goal of the article: guilt whites, not reveal truth.

Anonymous said...

"Why are comparisons about anything to do with blacks always against whites? Why is it always whites -blacks? Why can't other groups be used for comparison aginst this dysfunctional race?"

The white black gap is the only one that matters to status whoring leftists, and to those using blacks and black dysfunction as a bludgeon against whites.

Uland said...

My wife, who works in the field of Womens' Health, tells me that black women are notoriously resistant to breast feeding. To make matters worse, any new mother who requests it will get a case of "free" formula ( in Minnesota).My wife tells me that black women are basically the only patients who make the request.

I don't think I need to go into how important breast milk is in building up immune systems in babies; they essentially download whatever immunities/defenses the mother has acquired.

Cooking time and adding milk said...

There is an incredible trend among white women to induce labor early rather than wait. Doctors generally give the green light at 38 weeks instead of 40. It's much better for the doc because he won't be called at 2am on an unknown date, instead he can plan on pulling out a baby at 9 am on tuesday. And for the women, who are in the grips of fear on a level they have seldom encountered, the reassurance and certainty of a delivery date is comforting. But it's really important for babies to fully cook and doctors are notoriously wrong about babies being ready. It leads to all kinds of problems, includimg more c-sections, which are money makers for the doc, so that's no problem at all.

This isn't as big of a problem for Hispanic and black babies because their gestation period is shorter. They are more likely cooked by week 38 and often times come well before week 40. My bet would be that if you compared non induced hispanics to non induced whites, you would see the data change. I would bet, without knowing, that asians let their babies cook longer than white women rather than inducing.

Why do blacks do so much worse in these areas than hispanics? As big as their breasts are, blacks are the least likely to breastfeed for one. But I don't know the figures for hispanics. Hispanics also have mcu greater family support in child rearing than blacks or whites. It might not be fun to live with a large extended family a lot of the time, but all of those spare old ladies and young girls come in handy when there is a baby.

You also have to factor in number of children had when looking at white vs. hispanics. Practice makes perfect and using equipment early and often is better for it than pulling it out of the garage 1.2 times in a lifetime...

Anonymous said...

Seond hand tobacco smoke is associated with SIDS deaths and is the likely cause of lower SIDS deaths in Hispanics and Asians.

Anonymous said...

"much better to try to fit everyone neatly into Rushton's simple elegant mongoloid ,Caucasoid, Negroid triarchy."

Yeah, I can see why that would appeal from an elegance point of view (it's wrong, but I can see why it would appeal) but even then you'll just run into problems with the indisputably Mongoloid South East Asians (even the Malays are basically Mongoloid, despite Lynn's weirdness like grouping them with the more phenotypically distant New Guineans - even old Rushton uses the psychologically unimpressive Thais as an "Oriental" population in his "research") and Upper Caste Indians, so it seems like a pointless endevour.

"90% of the time, SIDS = infanticide"

Interesting given that historically there is a great of infanticide in East Asian populations, but that seems driven by limited resources and social expectations (i.e. to have a boy and because they are poor peasants or prostitutes who cannot bring up a child) where I do not know if it is more driven by a stronger sense of self in African and Caucasoid populations.

Anonymous said...

I doubt it's 90%, given that 'back to sleep' alone close to halved the SIDS rate - but yes, that would be something we would be doing wrong!

On r-k, do whites have lower parental investment than Hispanic Mestizos, as well as east-Asians?


Although, you could actually see infanticide as evidence of K-selection under the right conditions - if raising a child is costly (as in a K selector) then infanticide would be more likely if the child was deemed substandard (provided there was a good probability of getting pregnant again). K-selection is, I guess, how much a parent invests in offspring, not necessarily how much they care for them.

dcite said...

"Asian people are a lot more defined by their children than the other presented races, and thus are less likely to kill them.."

Strange thing to say of a culture that practiced female infanticide (and still does) almost routinely. The Asian-sympathizer, author (The Good Earth) Pearl Buck, who grew up in China, d.o. missionaries, once found that in a large group of village women, all had killed baby girls, although all claimed that they themselves had not done the deed. Most said their husband or the midwife had done it. All cried. Probably they could not admit it if they had done it. One told a missionary that her husband had dashed the unfortunate against the wall he was so disgusted. In any case, infanticide was something that Asians (men and women) are familiar with and had no moral scruples about, unlike Christian, Muslims and Jews. Mohammed outlawed female infanticide among the Arabs. Indeed, the Arabs were some of the worst. Pearl Buck noted that among the Chinese, if the child was not killed at birth then it was not deliberately killed at all. No one could bring themselves to do it once the baby had drawn breath. The ancient Arabs, however, would sometimes wait until she was 6 or 7, take her for walk in the desert where a hole had been dug, and then push her in it, burying her alive. Almost beggers belief, but the repentant Arabs themselves confessed these acts to Mohammed, and begged forgiveness. They were a cruel, desperate people and Mohammed improved them believe it or not. I'm not a Mohammed fan, but I give credit where credit is due.

OTOH, infanticide has always been rare in black Africa. Oh, the babies might die along the way, often of abuse and neglect to judge from the baby-rape stories coming out of there (said to cure AIDS); but they had no custom of killing newborns as did so many Asian and south American Indians, nor was there aversion towards daughters.
This is not ancient history, is very well documented by friend and foe of these cultures, and doesn't require that much info to verify. In fact, it's still going on. About 10 yrs ago I read of villages in northern India, probably of a certain caste, where no female infants were raised. All were killed and always had been, wives being imported from villages where they were less ruthlessly culled. The British outlawed this in the late 1900s; humane Indians since then have tried to stamp it out, with some success, and I was surprised to read that it still went on.
So however "defined" Asians and Indians are by their children, they have no special history of preserving their lives that well. Sons may have been more desired but they were often beaten and abused. I suspect that part of the Hispanic success is that they access the healthcare system and despite their weight problems, still eat a lot of traditional rice&beans sorts of dishes. But that's just a guess. They are also aficiandos of fast food in America.

Anonymous said...

much better to try to fit everyone neatly into Rushton's simple elegant mongoloid ,Caucasoid, Negroid triarchy

Nature is rarely that elegant, at least not in the biological sciences. There are always complications on top of complications. The r-K theory, if true, is at best one factor in explaining differences in racial intelligence and behavior.

(HBD'ers in general should have a little humility, and keep in mind that the idea that these differences are genetic is itself still an unproven theory. Personally I think it's probably true, but it's not as clear cut as many of the people in these forums make it out to be).

Anonymous said...

Catperson, come on...every group has to fit into three archaic races now?

Anonymous said...

White and black women regard babies as a burden in the way of their masculine ambitions and put their babies into padded cells to sleep where they sometimes get into knots their unformed baby limbs can't escape and they die.

Too many white women and their husbands are still the reptilian Victorian refrigerator parents who will endlessly torture the child for his (and sometimes her, though this happens mostly to boys) own good. And of course god, king, and country.

Otherwise Junior will become "spoiled", and then graduate to a fully-fledged gay, effeminate, psychotic, criminal, communist, anti-American terrorist of the Semiconscious Liberation Army.

Anonymous said...

I also wonder about Ashkenazi Jews; they score higher than even east Asian Mongoloids despite being part of the mediocre Caucasoid race


Good old Catperson! We can always rely on you to make some bizarre assertions which need to be corrected.

"Ashkenazi Jews" do not score higher than East Asians. There's some evidence that Ashkenazi Jews in America, who are a subset of all the Ashkenazi Jews in the world, may have a higher IQ score than do East Asians. But that's a dumb comparison - you can't compare a small specific subset of people to a large mass.

Moving along, it's a harsh reality that the "mediocre Caucasoid race" has created and done just about everything worthwhile which the human race has created and done. They created the world you live in, my feline friend, both the tangible world (computers and such) and the intangible one - the ideas floating around in your head.

Roger Chaillet said...

Ah, they mythical "Hispanics."

Why not compare them to their cousins, the indigenous (sic) who reside on the reservations?

New Mexico ranks very high in terms of fetal alcohol syndrome. http://www.textmed.com/heatmaps/disease/fetal-alcohol-syndrome-us-heatmap.gif Ditto for the Dakotas; both are home to plenty of indigenous (sic). http://www.textmed.com/heatmaps/disease/fetal-alcohol-syndrome-us-heatmap.gif See here, too. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/09/fetal-alcohol-syndrome-rate-higher-among-american-indians/

Maya said...

Simon said:
"On r-k, do whites have lower parental investment than Hispanic Mestizos, as well as east-Asians? My own experience as a white parent was that I was ridiculously over-fearful of my child dying"

Of course, most normal parents are loving, doting and obsessed with their children's well being. We are talking about the very few who are not. Then, other factors and motivators come into play. From what I can tell, motherhood pretty much defines women in Hispanic societies. So even if this particular rare Hispanic woman feels less joy in motherhood, she's less likely to destroy her offspring because her status and identity comes from family. Asians (again, speaking in general terms) seem to be under a lot of pressure to succeed, both in their careers and family lives. When I lived in Korea, I found out that many couples were sleeping separately for years, but couldn't divorce because it would ruin their status in their respective careers and affect the status of their children. Same went for their children's successes. Now, obviously, all normal parents want their children to do well, but Asians have an added motivator of their standing in society being tied to their offspring's success. So, should an Asian mother's normal parental instinct fail, she still has a stake in her child's survival. (Of course, status is also the reason Asians in their old countries are so prone to kill baby daughters.) White and black identities are not as tied to their children, at least not in the United States. As a society, we don't pity Oprah.

Laban said...

Si - "the average IQ of the young world population would decline by 1.34 points per decade"

That's a lot compared to Greg Cochran's estimate :

2B: "What is the Gregory Cochran view on 'Idiocracy'? I.e. the recent phenomenon where rich countries' economic surplus, created by the successful evolutionary adaptation of their population acts nowdays to yield a sizable demographic surplus of gene-carriers of the less successful adapters."

GC: Average genetic IQ potential is probably dropping: something in the range of 0.5 -1.0 pts per generation. The driver is mostly low fertility among women with lots of education.

Maya said...

Catperson,

Biased tests are a crock of shit. American Indians and Australian Aboriginals watch mainstream TV, go to government schools and are immersed in mainstream culture. If you gave Muslim girls as an example, or any other population whose consumption of mainstream culture might be severely restricted, it would make a little more sense. Have you seen that article about a poor little native American girl who lives on a reservation, on yahoo a couple of days ago? Yes, she is pictured in traditional clothes, but there are pepsi cans and a TV in the background, and her dream is to marry Justin Beiber. There is no great cultural divide. I came to America just in time for middle school, grew up in a house where English wasn't spoken, lived in a very immigrant-dominated neighborhood and ate red beet soup a lot. Trust me, standardized and IQ tests didn't appear alien to me. In modern civilization, we are surrounded by the mainstream culture.

helene edwards said...

darker blacks who be less intelligent and wilder

You must not live among many blacks. Generally speaking, darker = more genial and civilized, less crazy.

The Truth About Racism said...

All NY Times readers know that the sole cause of "elevated" black infant mortality rate is white racism. The "search" for causative factors is a distraction, a smokescreen puffed out by racist white doctors to cover up the effects of white racism.

We can be sure that white racism causes elevated black infant mortality bcause in African countries where there are almost no white people, infant mortality is much higher. You see, in majority-white countries, white people hold down the level of racism they emit so as to keep the toxic side effects from injuring white babies, but in majority-black countries, white racism is turned on full blast so it injurers nearly every baby.

Anonymous said...

Yet another aspect of the Hispanic Paradox.

Peter

Justin said...

Hmmm, how would abortion rates look in that same table?

Get Off My Lawn! said...

I wonder if geography might play at least a small role: Hispanics and Asians are more urban than blacks and whites. Urban life has its problems, but it does provide more access to free or low-cost prenatal care and, maybe more important here, better access to tertiary care facilities.

In other words, are Hispanic mothers more likely to deliver in big hospitals with advanced neonatal ICUs? Do Hispanic infants more often get their care at urban teaching hospitals with a full range of pediatric subspecialties and pediatric intensive care units?

Meanwhile, some white and black mothers are delivering at rural hospitals that lack the resources to provide immediate intensive care to newborns in trouble. Once they go home, the kids have a longer trip to high-level emergency pediatric care if they get sick. And, meanwhile, if Mom was poor, she was relying on the very limited options likely available for prenatal care in Podunk.

That has to make a difference, even if only a statistically small one.

Anonymous said...

Great post. Please email me at scottdude0506@aim.com if you want genetic data that I have access to.

DavidB said...

Premature delivery and low birth weight are twice as high among US blacks as among whites. I guess this would largely account for the higher infant mortality rate. Of course, it leaves the question why premature delivery and low birth weight are high. Age of the mother? Drug use? Obesity? Absence of the father?

beowulf said...

"90% of the time, SIDS = infanticide."
I doubt it's 90%, given that 'back to sleep' alone close to halved the SIDS rate

That's a really interesting question. From a few minutes of googling, I've seen estimates of the % of SIDS cases that are actually misdiagnosed infanticide ranging from 5% to 75%.

Anonymous said...

"For example, in England, local authority social services responsible for fostering/adopting children are absolutely inundated with black kids - to the point where there are kids of no other ethnicities being put up for adoption.We are talking of at least 95% black/mixed race children in local authority care."

Good example of "r" strategy. Pump the kids out and let someone else raise them assuming some of them will survive.

Anonymous said...

With r:K selection, it's interesting, because we do view richer people as more K as well (they have fewer babies, higher quality, so why not, right?) but on the other hand, my understanding is that they do nurture less and use nannies and services to raise the child more (think of historical upper middle or aristocratic class practices of chucking the baby at the nearest Amah or wetnurse).

Anonymous said...

Btw, I wouldn't trust Mexican and Chinese official statistics on anything. Who knows what really happens in the Mexican and Chinese countryside or even citywide.

Anonymous said...

"You must not live among many blacks. Generally speaking, darker = more genial and civilized, less crazy."

Sheeeeeeeeet.

Anonymous said...

Infant mortality is bad but abortion is good. Hmm.

Anonymous said...

It's kinda disingenuous for us to complain of the left's obsession with white-black gap when we too are obsessed with black-white differences in IQ, temperament, personality, creativity, crime, athletics, sexuality, etc.

Where we differ from the Left is we focus on biology and culture whereas the Left prefers to focus on history and economics.

So, we ascribe black crim mainly to blacks being naturally stronger, fiercer, more aggressive, and etc. and the culture of violence and dysfuction, as in rap music.

The Left says black crime is the product of history of oppression and poverty.

Simon in London said...

Me:
"I doubt it's 90%, given that 'back to sleep' alone close to halved the SIDS rate

Anon:
"Correlation != Causation, remember?

The other posters are quite correct--SIDS is a myth, it is just the comforting myth our society has decided to adopt."

This makes no sense to me. Changing NHS advice from front-sleeping to back-sleeping resulted in a huge drop in SIDS here in the UK, same as in the US.

Trew said...

Yes, I'd lke to hear more about the effects of STDs (and homocide) on infant mortlity.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if this plays a part, but I wonder if gestational diabetes comes into play here. It's very common to see a young black woman, late teens, early twenties, being hugely overweight during pregnancy.

Carol said...

Interesting stuff about Mohammed. It's funny how indigenous religious leaders come to discourage infanticide. It's rather like overcoming a Culture of Death in favor of life. It's meant, really, for the immediate audience - not all peoples everywhere. For the Race, so to speak.

Andrew Ryan said...

All of this focus on black mother's behavior post-birth (e.g. failure to breast feed) ignores the fact that by far the largest factor in the increased black infant mortality is that the number of deaths due to low birth weight is four times higher than among whites.

The very high rate of sexually-transmitted infections (e.g. ~50% of adult black women have genital herpes) could very well play role. In the following study, STIs were considered "medical complications":

"In this population, controlling for maternal demographic characteristics and medical complications of pregnancy produced a predicted mean birth weight for black infants that was 100 g less than that for white infants (53% of the observed racial difference in mean birth weight)."

From:

South Med J. 1991 Apr;84(4):443-6.
Differences in black and white infant birth weights: the role of maternal demographic factors and medical complications of pregnancy.
Hulsey TC, Levkoff AH, Alexander GR, Tompkins M.

beowulf said...

OT but interesting TNR piece, "What's Driving Mitt Romney's China Bashing?"
On immigration, Romney is clearly trying to get to Rick Perry's right. With the anti-China line, Romney can seek to appeal to both ends of the spectrum, given how widespread and disparate anxiety about free trade has become...
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-stump/96274/mitt-romney-china-basher

Anonymous said...

"It's kinda disingenuous for us to complain of the left's obsession with white-black gap when we too are obsessed with black-white differences in IQ, temperament, personality, creativity, crime, athletics, sexuality, etc. "

This gap has formed the cornerstone of all of our policys for half a century, why wouldn't we discuss it?

Anonymous said...

Tea Partiers were respectful, orderly, and clean, but MSM demeaned them as hateful and extreme.

Occupy Wall Street people are filthy, obscene, hateful, and even violent, but they are made out to be decent people who CARE.

Well-behaved conservatives got more flak than ill-behaved leftists.
If Tea Partiers acted like Occupiers are doing, they would have been called Beerhall Nazis.

Double standard.

Catperson said...

Good old Catperson! We can always rely on you to make some bizarre assertions which need to be corrected.

"Ashkenazi Jews" do not score higher than East Asians. There's some evidence that Ashkenazi Jews in America, who are a subset of all the Ashkenazi Jews in the world, may have a higher IQ score than do East Asians. But that's a dumb comparison - you can't compare a small specific subset of people to a large mass.



actually there are more Ashkenazi in America than there are in Israel. Do you know your facts? I think not. And according to Richard lynn, Ashkenazi Americans average IQ 110 while Ashkenazis in Israel average IQ 103. By contrast East Asians in east Asia average IQ 105 while east Asians in north America average less, so overall east Asians score lower than Ashkenazis.


Moving along, it's a harsh reality that the "mediocre Caucasoid race" has created and done just about everything worthwhile which the human race has created and done. They created the world you live in, my feline friend, both the tangible world (computers and such) and the intangible one - the ideas floating around in your head.



Actually money, weights and measures, gun powder and even the compus were all invented in china. All the fundamentals started in china and caucasoids just built on them. Do you know your facts? I think not.

NOTA said...

double standard anonymous:

And you have seen the OWS protesters with your own eyes, enough to know what the average protester looks and sounds like?

See, I remember the pre-midterm-election coverage of the Tea Party in the MSM. You'd have a rally of a couple thousand people, and there would be a picture in the paper of one idiot carrying a rifle and an inflamatory sign, or a single excerpted man-on-the-street type interview with someone who sounded like they flunked out of their prison's GED training for lack of brains. And I remember the pictures of the antiwar rallies, too--weird looking people with offensive signs.

Why, it's almost like the MSM in the US is in the business of ridiculing any political or social movement that threatens the interests of the powerful, and like you cant actually trust them to give you a fair representation of what those protesters believe or want or look like.

NOTA said...

catperson:

For all its flaws, I think Guns Germs and Steel had the basic picture right--the world dominating civilization could plausbly have risen from any of the core civlizations that were connected and in-play, ranging from NW europe in the west to China and Japan in the east. I suspect it was an historical accident that Europe produced the explosion of culture and science and economy and govenment that has basically taken over the world--that could plausibly have happened from China or India or the Middle East. But not from sub-Saharan Africa or Australia/Oceana ever. There were Indians in the Americas who could have eventually built up that kind of culture, but they were a thousand or more years behind the Eurasian cultures.

ben tillman said...

Premature delivery and low birth weight are twice as high among US blacks as among whites.

Premature by what standard? Blacks have shorter gestation periods, and I doubt those compiling the data take this into account.

Anonymous said...

"European ancestry people in the US (especially in the North) are living in roughly the sort of geographic environment that our ancestors lived in in Europe."

No, we're not.

Kansas City is the same latitude as Jerusalem.

Juneau Alaka is the same latitude as Aberdeen.

Europe is much farther north, but winters in America are much colder.

However, Europe gets less sunlight because it is farther north, so Europeans are at a slight advantage for vit D being farther south. Doesn't help with skin cancer, unfortunately.

Anonymous said...

Why are comparisons about anything to do with blacks always against whites? Why is it always whites -blacks? Why can't other groups be used for comparison aginst this dysfunctional race?

Because that's The Narrative. This is the sort of thing I like to bring up with respectable cowardly types.

Anonymous said...

LOL, i'll tell you, one comparison they never make along the standard european versus african metric is "number of programming languages created."

I think dragging other races into it might piss them off more. Noting that Whites are intermediate between Blacks and Yellows on many, if not most important metrics is not in The Narrative.

And mentioning that in most of the areas that Yellows edge out Whites, Whites trounce Blacks, and most of the areas that Blacks edge out Whites, Whites trounce Yellows, is probably a big no-no; The Narrative says, in any given area, either Blacks or Yellows are superior; looking at the math beyond that is racism.

Anonymous said...

"Whites, especially among white trash Christian evangelicals, don't go for abortion or you often have trashy idiots having kids."

White trash is a meme invented by Hollywood (think Deliverence and Texas Chain saw massacre) to provide a straw man opponent to the so-called Civil Rights movement which was really all about redistributing white housing and infrastructure to blacks. I find that personal decency, concern, and courtesy are way more common in white communities regardless of income. I'd rather have my car break down on the back roads of Tennesse or West Virginia than in Philly or DC.

Or Cupertino, for that matter.

To illustrate what is common attitude in China, check out the Live Leak video:

http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=chinese+girl+run+over

18 people pass by and do nothing although they see a 2 year old girl writhing in a pile of her own bloody viscera. She was slowly run over twice (four times if you count the number of times an SUV wheel ran over her body).

Compare typical Chinese behavior to the group of random whites in Utah who at great personal risk freed a motorcyclist pinned under a burning car. To the guy who hates white trash evangelicals I say FU, and thank God for their high birth rates.

Anonymous said...

Cncerning the Chinese girl run over twice. Maybe it's more likely to be like that in China, but stories like that come out here too. In big metropolises. Remember the Kitty Genovese story? Will they ever let us forget it? I remember an interview with Truman Capote he was asked about two phenomenon considered to be illnesses of modern alienation: case of a crowd yelling for a would-be suicide to jump; and ignoring the cries for help from a person in danger.
Capote said the second case was peculiar to large cities where people don't know each other and you have no idea what's transpiring--people get killed themselves being good Samaritans. OTOH, the jerks yelling for the despairing person to go ahead and jump already is a part of human nature--the urge to something exciting and get an annoying impediment over with. Unless you control it, or are a genuinely nice person, you are prone to feel that way, at least for a moment, as an observer in such a situation.

dcite said...

"It's meant, really, for the immediate audience - not all peoples everywhere. For the Race, so to speak."

Not in the case of Mohammed. He intended his religion to be worldwide, not confined to Arabs. Nor was this religion meant to be associated with any particular race or "chosen people" (though Arabs came to see it that way.) His law against infanticide was reiiteration of the Jewish and Christian law against murder. The Arabs in question in my example were pagans, but Jews were well known and had their communities, and also, there many Christian Arabs in the 7th c. mid-east. One third of Iraq was Christian until most left in 70s.

dcite said...

"It's meant, really, for the immediate audience - not all peoples everywhere. For the Race, so to speak."

Not in the case of Mohammed. He intended his religion to be worldwide, not confined to Arabs. Nor was this religion meant to be associated with any particular race or "chosen people" (though Arabs came to see it that way.) His law against infanticide was reiiteration of the Jewish and Christian law against murder. The Arabs in question in my example were pagans, but there many Christian Arabs in the 7th c. mid-east. One third of Iraq was Christian until most left in 70s.

micrognathia said...

Uhh, I really don't know. But I think to avoid SIDS our babies must have a solid immune system to prevent this heart breaking syndrome.

-admin