Christopher Ingraham: “Where do America’s most racist people live? ‘The rural Northeast and South,’ suggests a new study just published in PLOS ONE.”
“For the PLOS ONE paper, researchers looked at searches containing the N-word … It’s also 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, either. 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, on the map above 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.”
“So some people are sitting at home by themselves, Googling a bunch of racist stuff. What does it matter? As it turns out, it matters quite a bit. The researchers on the PLOS ONE paper found that racist searches were correlated with higher mortality rates for blacks, even after controlling for a variety of racial and socio-economic variables.”
This is news? On what planet did anybody of sense and intelligence not know where racism persists?
I was actually surprised to see the area I live in shaded pink instead of red. Because I KNOW it should be red. Seen too much with my own eyes.
Not all racists are doing internet searches. Some paranoid types may intentionally avoid documenting their racism with search histories.
I gotta say I didn’t see Missouri or Oklahoma coming.
I didn’t think Ohio, NY, and PA would be quite that bad..though I am somewhat familiar with central PA.
trust me, Pa. is bad when you get to Pennsyltucky.
As James Carville once said, in Pennsylvania everything outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh is essentially Alabama.
I thought that was Ed Rendell
not surprised
What’s wrong with Rhode Island???
Everything.
The areas seem to be based on TV markets. Oddly, some adjacent areas have very different results. Houston is apparently low in racists, but neighboring Beaumont-Orange-Port Arthur is high. Most of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is high in racist searches but a neighboring area in northern Wisconsin in very low.
Lansing is very low, but Flint-Saginaw and Toledo are both very high.
What a stupid poll.