Uh huh..
My argument is that race/racism is a cause of some some POC populations being disproportionately poor and pretending poverty and racism are separate and distinct forces is silly.
I mean, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family, how do you explain that without considering the historical facts of racism?
Yes it can sometimes be a cause. But the article focuses on racism as the overarching cause of disparities in sleep, and the factors that lead to it.
If you go back in history long enough, the answer to why a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family is guns, germs, and steel. Whitey built boats that could sail across oceans before most other ethnicities, they had access to guns and gun powder, they had more advanced medicine, they had literacy. Parts of Asia had similar.
Here's the short history of humanity: humans are racist, violent, and selfish. Whitey won the technology race, and so had the power to spread their racism, violence, and selfishness on everyone else. As a consolation prize, most everyone else got access to whitey technology.
Whitey won the technology and education race and most everyone else is playing catch up. Racism can be a barrier in that catch-up, but it's not the reason why certain groups are playing catch up in the first place.
Indigenous people were often not treated well by whitey, but indigenous people were also illiterate and didn't have an advanced writing system/alphabet etc when Columbus showed up. They had carvings and drawings and oral teachings but no books. They didn't have horses or domesticated animals. They were millennia behind western europeans and many asian cultures. Whitey has tried to catch them up in technology access & education etc, but whitey did a bad job of it (ie: residential schools, which were racist).
Bottom line is we can't expect people who were born and grew up in rural Nunavut or rural Zimbabwe to have the same outcomes as people who were born and grew up in Toronto, even if racism never happened. Even a lot of rural white people are barely literate. Yes we have to fix the racism in our society, but we also have to figure out how to get poor and less educated people caught up with people who have more advanced outcomes, which includes reducing racism barriers but also other important factors, like education. This is as true within Canada/US as it is globally.
So i don't think always blaming racism and whitey for all bad outcomes (like sleep) among POC is 1. factual, or 2. constructive. If people want to blame whitey or racism for some of it that's perfectly reasonable.