Blake Hall
How do you zero in on America and highlight pockets of racism specifically and accurately enough that you can draw a map based on this data?
You Google it, of course.
That’s precisely what the “peer-reviewed open access scientific journal” PLOS ONE did to devise the map below, which paints the country according to the degrees of bigotry it possesses.
This from the Washington Post:
“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.
For the PLOS ONE paper, researchers looked at searches containing the N-word. People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches for “migraine(s),” “economist,” “sweater,” “Daily Show,” and “Lakers.” (The authors attempted to control for variants of the N-word not necessarily intended as pejoratives, excluding the “a” version of the word that analysis revealed was often used “in different contexts compared to searches of the term ending in ‘-er’.”)
Here it is (click to enlarge):
