Researchers have created a map of regional racism levels using Google

Have you ever wondered how racist your area is in comparison the rest of the United States? Well, two separate groups of researchers have spent the past couple of years trying to find out. By looking at what people in a given region are searching on Google, the two groups have been able to create a rough map of which regions in the United States are the most racist, and the results aren’t particularly surprising. 

Want to know whether a given area has a higher number of racists than average? It turns out that Google searches can provide you with a pretty good answer, at least according to two recent studies. A few years ago, data analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz set out to study whether “racial animus,” or racism, could affect the outcome of a presidential election where one candidate was black. Luckily, he had a great dataset: Obama had just been elected, and there was a ton of data on how various areas had voted. But what he needed was a good proxy that measured the racism in these places. He decided to use Google searches on the word “nigger,” which he calls (quoting Randall Kennedy) “the paradigmatic slur.”