African Americans Have the Highest Rate of Fire Deaths and Injuries (2021)

https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2022/Learn-the-Sounds-of-Fire-Safety-to-Avoid-Danger-African-Americans-Have-the-Highest-Rate-of-Fire-Deaths-and-Injuries

by frasermarlow • 2 years ago

26 21 2 years ago

cpsc.gov

diogenescynic• 2 years ago

Is it because they don't change the batteries on smoke alarms? I also saw that as the cause for African Americans having poor sleep in a recent study: https://sahanjournal.com/health/sleep-science-black-insomnia...

tflol3• 2 years ago

It's because in less fortunate communities code enforcement isn't as strict so smoke detectors do not have to be hardwired.

edit: removed abrasive language

edit: Love the immediate downvoting. Please present your evidence that hardwired smoke detectors has nothing to do with this.

anon2914• 2 years ago

I live in the whitest part of the whitest city in America (Portland). I am not white if that matters. Anyway, no one has once checked for hardwired alarms and we even had our whole home rewired (chose not to get hardwired alarms because they're a menace).

vector_spaces2• 2 years ago

African Americans are more likely to be lower income, lower income folks are more likely to live in housing that is not up to code (missing sprinklers, detectors, fire escapes, and run by slumlords who simply don't care in ways that would likely be shocking to most decent people who haven't lived near the poverty line), where many, many people live in a single unit to make it affordable -- or because e.g. an uncle just got out of prison or someone you know is having some kind of emergency. When you're poor, you have a lot of emergencies and you know a lot of people having emergencies. Someone in your network is always having an emergency.

And yes, when you're making $9 an hour and your rent is 2/3 of your income, buying batteries for your chirping smoke detector is not top of mind.

This is all a byproduct of centuries of brutal economic warfare.

"These risk factors appear to be related to socioeconomic status of the victim to a greater extent than one’s race," Onwuachi-Saunders wrote. (from the article linked below)

But it turns out that in the US socioeconomic status and race are closely linked, at least in the aggregate.

https://www.northjersey.com/in-depth/news/2022/02/03/fire-in...

anon2914• 2 years ago

But it turns out that in the US socioeconomic status and race are closely linked, at least in the aggregate

In every country socioeconomic status is linked to subgroup culture and across the world different cultures have very different outcomes. That is not surprising. Neither the world nor people are uniform.

superb_dev• 2 years ago

“It’s always been like this” has never been a good reason for things to stay the same.

PostOnce• 2 years ago

Is there some country I'm unaware of where the poor don't underperform on every metric relative to the wealthy?

Money buys education, security/safety, health, access to social networks, and everything else, so why wouldn't the poor underperform?

I would think that the world is pretty uniform in that wealth solves a great deal of problems and poverty solves few.

EnigmaFlare3• 2 years ago

This is all a byproduct of centuries of brutal economic warfare.

Have you got a source for that?

Gibbon1• 2 years ago

Slavery and Jim Crow.

See also sundown towns, racial based exclusionary zoning, racial covenants, redlining, and Home Owners Associations.

vector_spaces2• 2 years ago

See e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4] (in particular see [4.a])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_per...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...

[4.a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...

anonygler• 2 years ago

I like how there's a persistent effort to make excuses on behalf of african americans. They're not being held back by history, they're being held back by chronically low expectations.

Pluck an average, random nobody from the 3rd world and drop them off in the USA. After a decade they'll be driving a Mercedes to inspect one of their several rental properties.

rich_sasha• 2 years ago

That doesn't seem to be the point? The point is (and I, not an American, have seen a few studies of this kind) that race predicts many outcomes, but not after controlling for income.

In other words, poor people in America are screwed, Black Americans tend to be poor (and mostly due to terrible socioeconomic processes in history).

It's not that it is OK if people are screwed "merely" due to income not race, but surely understanding the dynamic is key, no?

I'm talking from an ivory tower of statistics and papers, I barely spent a week in the USA in my whole lifetime.

samatman• 2 years ago

Seems to hold for vehicular accidents as well. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/dispari...

African Americans Have the Highest Rate of Fire Deaths and Injuries (2021)

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