I would like to hear a sociological explanation of this phenomenon.
Lets exclude Las Vegas, LA, NYC, and certain parts of Chicago. You’ll see people of any race out overnight in those locations. Lets also exclude inner cities and deep rural areas. Those places tend to be racially homogeneous regardless of the hour.
But elsewhere? Like many suburbs, especially the more inner ring ones? It’s crazy how the demographics can drastically change depending on the time of day/night. During the day, whites tend to outnumber people of color. Early night, pretty much the same. But once 10pm on weekdays and midnight on weekends strike, people of color outnumber whites. I know certain cultures near the equator practiced biphasic sleep patterns, in the past. But I don’t think any do today. Among blacks, Asians, and Hispanics…is being out late less taboo? Or something more practical?
I doubt that this has much to do with sleep patterns.
It’s not uncommon for urban areas to have quite different daytime and nighttime economies — you can easily think of areas that are bustling by day but dead at night, or full of office workers by day and entertainment-seekers by night. Such places draw different crowds at different times of the day, and the crowds vary in many demographic characteristics - age, income bracket, socioeconomic class, etc. You’re noticing the variation in race, perhaps, because you’re sensitised to race.
Quite. Over here, it wouldn’t surprise me if night and early morning work shifts were disproportionately made up of people from ethnic minorities and recent immigrants trying to get a foothold.
I had no idea medieval England and modern Spain were cultures “near the equator”. In fact, it’s explicitly higher latitudes that are theorized to favour polyphasic sleep because of the shorter winter photoperiod.
Are you perhaps thinking of minorities who have to be out at night because they’re cleaning the streets and manning the all-night stores and doing shift work?
The opposite was true in sundown towns, where non-whites were forbidden to be at night:
Another possibility is an area with office buildings. Suppose the companies there were run by racists who didn’t hire non-whites for daytime office jobs. However, they hired non-whites who worked for those companies as people who cleaned the offices or did repair work on the offices or were security guards for the buildings at night.
Also, don’t pretend that the U.S. doesn’t still have areas that are more or less of various races. I should know, because I have lived in a suburb iwithn a metropolitan area that overall is of about the same mixture of races and ethnic groups as the U.S. as a whole. However, I have lived for thirty-four and a half years in an apartment complex that’s overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic. No one has ever grabbed me and said, “What’s a white guy doing in this apartment complex?”. However, I suspect that some of my neighbors have thought that.
Biphasic sleep isn’t the same as polyphasic sleep. Biphasic sleep refers specifcally to sleeping twice a day; in context a reference to the common historical pattern of napping during the hottest period of the day in warmer regions. A smart idea before air conditioning.
“Only madmen and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.”
Biphasic sleep is a subset of polyphasic sleep. That’s why there is no Wikipedia page for biphasic sleep, and why the polyphasic sleep Wiki mostly talks about biphasic examples for historical cases. Yes, language pedantry would say poly means “more than two”, but here, it’s the binary distinction between monophasic and polyphasic that matters, and bi- falls on the poly- side of that line.
For example, the actual scientific paper I cited uses them interchangeably when specificity isn’t needed, and explicitly uses polyphasic when referring to a biphasic sleep periodization.
This is why it’s better to avoid jargon and say ‘take a siesta and stay up later in the evening’ rather than ‘biphasic sleep patterns’. (And to say ‘daylight hours’ rather than ‘photoperiod’.)
As for the OP, it’s probably due to more PoCs doing gig work and other jobs that don’t follow office hours. Whites may also be more nervous about being out late at night.
Swing and night shifts are generally considered less desirable than a 9-5er. Is it really a mystery why immigrants and other marginalized groups are more represented in less desirable jobs?
I meant the OP should have said ‘siesta’, if that is what he meant, since it’s actually more specific than ‘biphasic sleep pattern’. And he wasn’t discussing research.
My residential neighbourhood has experienced a demographic shift over the years, from primarily residents of European heritage (e.g. Italians or Eastern Europeans) to a substantial number of Asian residents. So (anecdotally) younger residents in my neighbourhood are more likely to be non-white compared to older residents and (in my experience) I think that younger people are generally more likely to be out at night. Whereas retirement-age people are possibly more likely to be out during the daytime when younger people are at work or school.
Putting those things together, I agree there could be different ethnic breakdowns of who is out during the daytime vs. at night. I don’t know if the impact is huge, though.