(DISCLAIMER: If this turns into a debate about the existence of race, I’m going to scream. I’m asking a question based on something I’ve noticed. I’m not affirming or denying the existence of race. I am not saying all Downs Syndrome sufferers are the same. Read nothing into this question. Thank you.
I’m woefully undereducated about genes, chromosomes and genetics generally.
Oh, and I’m not sure whether it’s Downs or Down’s. Sorry. :()
I ride the bus occasionally, and when I’m on there I tend to see at least one or two people I can pick out as having Downs Syndrome. The thing is, they’re usually the exact, stereotyped “look”: white, sandy-brown hair, big eyes, etc. I very rarely see one with dark hair, and I have never, ever picked out an African-American as having Downs.
Does Downs occur less among those of African descent? Am I just missing a large segment of black Downs sufferers? Help me out here.
This site says there the frequency of Down’ Syndrome in different racial groups in the U.S. is similar.
This site shows several black individuals with Down Syndrome.
Down Syndrome is due to an extra copy of chromosome 21. The main risk factor is the age of the mother, with older mothers having much higher risk of giving birth to a Down child.
I don’t know why you might not be seeing black people with Down Syndrome. They certainly exist.
Incidentally, as the second site I linked to indicates, there are several physical characteristics linked to Down’s which account for the “look” associated with it. The “slanting” look to the eyes caused it to be referred to as “Mongolism” in the past. This dates back the time when Caucasians were seen as the acme of evolution (by scientists who not coincidentally all happened to be Caucasian), and the different kinds of mental retardation were seen as being throwbacks to the earlier stages of evolutionary development represented by the “more primitive” races. Other kinds of retardation were supposed to resemble the “Ethiopian” race, etc. Needless to say, this has long been completely debunked.
If you saw people with “big eyes and sandy hair,” you probably weren’t seeing Down’s syndrome at all. The primary physical sign is the epicanthic fold (“mongolism,” in the Bad Old Days), which makes the eyes look rather small. Another common sign is coarse, dark hair.
The syndrome is more common among whites than blacks, possibly because the proportion of over-40 mothers is higher, but the gap between the number of white people and the number of black people is far larger.
BTW, here’s J. Langdon Down’s essay, “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots”, from 1866, where he’s the first to use “Mongoloid Idiocy” to describe people with the syndrome.
BTW, here’s J. Langdon Down’s essay, “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots”, from 1866, where he’s the first to use “Mongoloid Idiocy” to describe people with the syndrome.
Where you live has to be a factor as well. The ethnic distribution in Hawaii is such that over 60% of the population is Asian, and only about 10% is Caucasian. It only makes sense, then, that I saw only one or two Caucasian kids with Down Syndrome, but a dozen or so Asian ones.
Somewhat off topic, but some retardation syndromes are harder to identify in some races. A woman in my lab, who is black, is studying DiGeorge syndrome (often associated with mental retardation, among other things). One of the characteristics of DiGeorge patients is a “crushed” looking ear that looks like someone pushed the top of the ear slightly towards the lobe. One day, she looked in the mirror, and saw that she herself had this characteristic ear. To make a long story short, many black people have this ear, and the classic definition of the syndrome (which looked only at white children) is pretty much useless in this respect for black children.
Don’t take offense to this, but how do you know they have Down’s syndrome? And how do you know you haven’t missed identifying someone as having Down’s because they didn’t fit the profile?
I’ve worked in schools for physically and mentally handicapped people. “The look” as you’ve described it is wildly inaccurate (hair and skin colour range match the general population in my experience, and others have already pointed out your error over the “large eyes”). It seems likely that you haven’t identified Down’s Syndrome correctly at all.
This might be bullshit, but I’ve heard tell that at one time scientists thought that “Mongolian idiots” were a step down the evolutionary ladder from the pinnacle of evolutionary perfection embodied by their Caucasian parents, and that the observation that some kids of African descent had Down Syndrome came as a big surprise and demolished their theory because they all were sure that Asians were more highly evolved than Africans.
If people actually believed that, I hate to think what kind of insane shit we believe now that’s going to sound this incredibly stupid in 100 years.
By the way, a lot of people do say “Down’s Syndrome,” but “Down Syndrome” is much more common. It makes sense if you think about it because some syndromes are named after more than one person and it’s a lot easier to say “Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome” than “Lesch’s and Nyhan’s Syndrome.” That might not be why it’s that way, but it makes it easier to remember.