RACISM: Shocking searches in surprising places

The elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016 generated much discussion about just how racist our country really is.

Stephens-Davidowitz writes that Google searches help provide the answer — and it’s not pretty.

He notes that the first time he typed the N-word into Google Trends, he expected it to be “a low volume search.”

“Boy, was I wrong,” he writes, noting that there were “millions of these searches every year.”

“In the United States, [the Nword] was included in roughly the same number of searches as the word ‘migraine(s),’ ‘economist,’ and ‘Lakers.’ ”

Digging deeper (and eliminating the version of the word often used in hip-hop lyrics, which he thought would skew the findings), Stephens-Davidowitz found that “20 percent of searches with the word . . . also include the word ‘jokes.’” The word was also commonly paired with the phrases “stupid . . .” and “I hate . . .”

Examining search results from the night of Obama’s 2008 election, he found that “roughly one in every hundred Google searches that included the word ‘Obama’ also included ‘kkk” or ‘n----r(s)’ . . . In some states, there were more searches for ‘n----r president’ than ‘first black president.’ ”

If the sheer volume of the racism was surprising, so was its location. “Surveys and conventional wisdom,” would have us believe racism was coming more from the South than the North and more from Republicans than Democrats. Online searches, he writes, show otherwise.

“The places with the highest racist search rates included upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, industrial Michigan and rural Illinois, along with West Virginia, southern Louisiana and Mississippi,” he writes. “The true divide, the data suggested, was not South versus North; it was East versus West. You don’t get this sort of thing much west of the Mississippi.”

As for party affiliation, “racist searches were no higher in places with a high percentage of Republicans than in places with a high percentage of Democrats.”

This data was borne out by voting patterns. Crunching the numbers, the author estimates “Obama lost roughly 4 percentage points nationwide just from explicit racism.”