Data reveals racism trends
Where do America’s most racist people live?
“The rural Northeast and South,” suggests a study just published in PLOS ONE.
The paper introduces a novel method for measuring the incidence of racist attitudes: Google search data. The methodology comes from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He’s used it before to measure the effect of racist attitudes on Barack Obama’s electoral prospects.
“Google data, evidence suggests, are unlikely to suffer from major social censoring,” Stephens-Davidowitz wrote in a previous paper. “Google searchers are online and likely alone, both of which make it easier to express socially taboo thoughts. Individuals, indeed, note that they are unusually forthcoming with Google.”
He also notes that the Google measure correlates strongly with other standard measures social science researchers have used to study racist attitudes. This is important because racism is a notoriously tricky thing to measure. Traditional survey methods don’t really work — if you flat-out ask someone if they’re racist, they will simply tell you no.
For the PLOS ONE paper, researchers looked at searches containing the Nword. People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches for “migraine(s),” “economist,” “sweater,” “Daily Show” and “Lakers.”
It’s important to note that not all people searching for the N-word are motivated by racism and that not all racists search for that word. But aggregated over several years and several million searches, the data give a pretty good approximation of where a particular type of racist attitude is the strongest.
Interestingly, the most concentrated cluster of racist searches happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up to New York and southern Vermont. Other hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and a large portion of Ohio.
The researchers on the PLOS ONE paper found that racist searches were correlated with higher mortality rates for blacks.