Where do racists in America live?

Published: Apr 28, 2015 3:26 p.m. ET


The most racist people in the U.S. appear to be clustered along the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia, through New York and all the way up to Vermont, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing a recent study from a scientific journal.
And how does one measure something as abstract as racism? This is where technology, or in this incidence, Google search, comes in handy. PLOS One used data on how often people searched a racial epithet on the Internet to determine where racists lived.
“Area racism was the proportion of Google searches containing the ‘N-word’ in 196 designated market areas,” the journal said.
This method, according to the Post, is more effective than it sounds because people are not constrained by typical social taboos when they conduct searches online, and the search results often tabulate with other metrics used by researchers studying race relations.
Aside from mapping racism in America, what is actually compelling about the study is that areas that showed high concentration of racist searches also correlated with high level of black mortality rate.
“DMAs characterized by a one standard deviation greater level of area racism were associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause Black mortality rate, equivalent to over 30,000 deaths annually,” said the journal.
To be sure, not everyone Googling the N-word is necessarily a bigot and the study provides no insight into racism against Hispanics or Asians who are often under-represented or marginalized in discussions about race.
Still, if there is anything positive to take away from this map, it is that flaming racism is relatively limited and concentrated in a few areas.