The most racist places in America according to Google

[FLPanhandle]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/the-most-racist-places-in-america-according-to-google/?utm_term=.d33e0317ee5b

&w=1484

Not surprised by my Florida panhandle area but the northeast and all along the west side of Appalachian mountains was a little surprising to me. Also, the south for all it's bad reputation looks better than the midwest and upper NE.

[Kirkwood]

1. Pennsylvania? Yikes. nt

[The Polack MSgt]

3. I keep telling people

The Appalachians are incredibly racist.

The San Bernadino county/high desert of California doesn't surprise me either

[former9thward]

25. That area also includes LA.

You might want to check the map....

[The Polack MSgt]

35. Yep - Orange County as well.

Doesn't change what I experienced in the "Inland Empire" and the high Dessert tho

[miyazaki]

67. When not living overseas I live in the high desert. Yes, even here in Socal, it's Trumpfuckistan.n/t

[Lee-Lee]

4. That follows my experiences

Philadelphia is the most racist place I have ever spent any time in my life.

In fact most of this map seems to reflect my experiences very well. For all the press the south gets I find a lot more racist behavior in the Midwest and northeast.

[Tree-Hugger]

8. Agreed

Born and raised in Philadelphia. I lived there for the majority of my life and currently live a few minutes outside of it. Racist as all Fuck. Progressive friends from elsewhere in the country think I live in some liberal golden city where racism is unheard of. They are shocked to learn the truth. A large chunk of people I grew up with are racist to the core. When I was in first grade, I was put into detention because I called an Asian kid "black." My mom raised hell, yet the teacher and school believed it was offensive for me to call someone black. And I went to school with many black children so I can only imagine how they were treated. Years ago, I reconnected with former grade school and high school classmates. I've unfriended probably 90% of them due to their bigoted screeds online. Hell, my own grandfather was a big time racist. He used to write nasty letters to the Inquirer and Daily News. He would wear a Nazi armband on Jewish holidays. Needless to say, my parents didn't associate with them much. A few houses in my neighborhood used to hang Aryan flags outside. My old neighborhood is no stranger to confederate flags and tea party logos and the area was full of Trump signs during the election. It's hilarious because it has a fair sized blue collar population and they don't realize how much they will be screwed under his administration. They just like the fact that he hates the same people they hate.

[Lee-Lee]

15. Philadelphia is the only place I've outright been refused service for having dark skin

I was at Ft Dix for a school and had weekends off and a groups of us went different places. One weekend we picked Philly.

Went into a bar and we all ordered drinks and they served the whites right off and didn't serve the non-whites. Called the bartender over and asked again and he said "I'm busy I'll get to you when I do" despite the place being nearly empty. One of the white makes with us said if this is the kind of service we get maybe we need to go elsewhere, still oblivious to what was happening thinking it was just poor service. The bartender replied "well some of you probably should" and then even he realized what was happening.

Got similar poor service- slow service for the on-whites, wrong drinks intentionally, etc at two more places. Finally had to ask a black cabbie wher we could all go and he laughed and said "welcome to Philly, Alabama of the north" and took us to a place.

[Barack_America]

65. Northeast?

[Tree-Hugger]

66. Yep. :) nt

[packman]

6. Closed steel mills, closed coal mines

Born in that area and a lot of resentment to economic forces the people can't understand. Also generations on generations on gov. welfare .

[snooper2]

11. yep, compare that to say Texas

Now you know why the south bashing is half bullshit...

[Kirkwood]

14. Yep. I grew up in Ohio and have lived the past 20+ years in Georgia.

There are a lot of racists everywhere.

[mitch96]

13. My family is from Western PA

They said the most racist things I ever heard... Even as a child it embarrassed the hell out of me..
I got transplanted to another state at a young age thank God...
m

[Orrex]

23. "Yikes" indeed, but honestly it surprises me not at all

I live in semi-rural western PA, and for raw bigotry my area would easily stand up to any imagined stereotype of "southern" racism.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. High correlation with Chump, i.e. Deplorable country.

[dalton99a]

5. If that's how they talk, that's how they act, that's how they live

It is a very accurate map

[smirkymonkey]

7. New York surprises me.

I knew there were pockets, but I didn't expect it to be so widespread in such a blue state.

[winstars]

9. Drive an hour north of NYC and you might as well be in Alabama, generally...

[crazycatlady]

19. Putnam County?

[winstars]

21. Anywhere out of the 5 boroughs; although tRump is from Queens and Staten Island has a R congressman

[crazycatlady]

22. Westchester's pretty blue

At least my hometown is. And the two towns just north of there have some pretty high-profile Democrats living there.

[winstars]

29. For sure. But having lived in the area my entire life, a bit more north or west and...

Don't get me started about South Jersey.... Some places down there are like Tobacco Road....


Its all good though, to each their own I suppose...

[crazycatlady]

36. NJ has a Mason-Dixon line

AKA Route 195.

[NewRedDawn]

41. Yep my County of Herkimer

NY is there. Bunch of confederate flag waving Morons who like myself had ancestors fighting for the union. I live in Trumpkinville.

[HughBeaumont]

10. Oh look, SlowHio's mostly red.

Even more red than the South.

THAT'S a two-handed shocker.

[irisblue]

37. I sure hope Franklin County& Columbus City are in the blue area of Ohio

Butttt.....

[OriginalGeek]

12. I don't trust all that western blue

Last edited Mon May 8, 2017, 04:06 PM - Edit history (1)

I wonder if maybe they just don't google the n-word as much because they don't google much out there. OR is that a percentage of all googlers in the country or just google searches in the area?

then again I've never been farther west than Possum Kingdom in Texas but I grew up there (Dallas, Texas - just visited PK a lot) and nearly everyone I knew was racist and some were openly KKK.


ETA~ Damn I almost forgot - a year and ahalf ago I visited Denver for a week so I guess now I have been farther west than Possum Kingdom.

[hunter]

16. In western cowboy country the black population is small.

Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans are the more likely targets of racists, and it's dangerous to be LGBT in many places too.

I'm speculating there's not a lot of overt internet hostility toward black people because they never see black people except on television. But that's also why President Obama drove so many of them over the edge. In their minds U.S. presidents are supposed to be white guys.

[Egnever]

17. An interesting post

One I have been thinking about lately. The US is a large country. It is entirely possible to live two completely different realities inside the US and not understand what others lives are like.


I live in Las Vegas. One of the most diverse cities in the country. There is certainly racism here but nothing like other parts of the country. You see diversity here every where you go including social settings.

Some times it is difficult for me to understand why people think racism is so prevalent when you almost never see it here.

Admittedly I am a white guy and so would not see it as often as others would anyway but I have been other places in the country where it was seen daily by me.

Hard to really wrap your head around the idea that even in the US we have differing cultural norms that vary from State to state and sometimes even inside those States.

Growing up in say Montgomery Alabama, is a whole different life than growing up in Monterey California. You probably won't really notice much on a vacation but live in each for a year and the differences become pretty striking.

[OriginalGeek]

32. Yeah, I've lived in the south all my life

but I've lived in a lot of places in the south and I feel like it's a totally different experience just between here in Orlando, FL and Florence, KY and Dallas, TX.

I was born in Tallahassee but we moved away from there pretty early. We moved around a lot because my dad was looking for work.

For a little bit we lived in Maryland and I remember moving back to Jacksonville when I was in 3rd grade and the first thing the neighbor kid asked me before he'd be my friend was "Are you a yankee or a rebel?" lol, I didn't even know what either one was. But it occurs to me now that the only reason he'd ask about that is because it was important to his folks.

I guess I answered correctly though because he was my friend until we moved again a year later. I seem to recall he was a bit skeptical when I said I had just moved from MD though because it was more north than we were. I wonder if he ever found out MD was part of the south.

In Dallas my mother divorced my dad and married a racist piece of shit. We were big into Fundie baptist church because they loved the racists. It was a safe haven for white supremacists where the pastor would openly tell N jokes from the pulpit. In the back of my little brain I knew it was wrong but I also new contradicting my step-asshole meant the belt or (usually) worse so I just went along to get along and left home at 17 and never went back except for my mom's funeral. Just waiting for my brothers to let me know he's dead so I can go piss on his grave. I think I'll start practicing drawing a Black Panther raised fist with my pee so it will stain his grave in that shape.

[Egnever]

38. I have a similar experience

Except I went from Chicago to Florida to Oklahoma to California to Vegas.


The difference between Oklahoma and California was staggering. I went from a high school in OK that for a lot of the guys the weekend activity was looking for gays to beat up to San Fransisco. I remember clearly my first trip to the beach in SF and seeing two guys holding hands walking down the beach. It was to my mind at the time so utterly shocking yet at the same time so completely normal in the way they were doing it. It made me question my entire life in Oklahoma.

I think that move to SF probably saved me from becoming just another racist asshole from Oklahoma. The peer group in OK was certainly preparing me for that.


SF opened my eyes to how silly the racism and homophobia was as I was instantly thrown into a culture that was not only very diverse but also very accepting of all walks of life. I quickly discovered that all of the BS I was learning in OK was just that BS. I have never looked back.

Over the years since that move I have spent lots of time in gay bars with friends of mine that we're gay and actually at one point was into shaming my non gay friends for being afraid to go into them. This would never have happened if I had stayed in Oklahoma.

I have also lived in the hood and gotten a good look at the ghetto and the people there as well. Again most of them like anyone else are good people just trying to survive in a shit situation.

I think life hands you experience and if you live and die in the same town your experience is limited. If you grow up around bunch of redneck fuck heads your odds of becoming one go up significantly. There are still a lot of places in the US still where the racist fuck head contingent is strong. I sometimes forget living where I do that the rest of the country is not necessarily on the same wavelength.

[Blue_Tires]

24. +1

I can personally attest to places like Missouri and Arizona...

[m-lekktor]

18. Rhode Island is interesting to me.

I guess I don't know much about that state and I currently live next door in Connecticut!

[Straw Man]

20. I'm confused.

How can it be that absolutely nowhere in the country is "average"? Everything is either above or below. What kind of sampling method yields results like that?

[Hortensis]

34. And it reports only the volume seeking one word,

not why. Not long ago I searched on a story about a congressman who foolishly used that word in an email or something. How bigoted of me? Interesting for what it is, but the headline's inappropriate.

I'm currently in that spot of dark blue on Florida's west central coast. A lot of Canadians and northerners, mostly from midwestern states, come down here to retire or just escape their winters, but even averaging the whole goulash together I'd hardly characterize it as a bastion of tolerance and liberal attitudes. The most liberal parts are generally considered to be toward the Atlantic coast, which has tended to draw more people from the liberal northeast.

[GulfCoast66]

40. I am about an hour east southeast of you which is pink on the map-Lake county.

But I very regularly fish, scallop and stay in your part of the state, mainly Crystal River. I have noticed a very high percentage of the people I meet on the coast are from up north. But if you go about 20 miles inland, which granted has a much lower population if is an entirely different story. Solid red country.

And I truly love the part of the state you live in!

[Hortensis]

43. Well, we're inland, an old MH on a marsh--normally.

This horrific drought is drying it out, no longer protection against the extreme fire danger for our county. The rapidly narrowing still-there water around our place is becoming really good hunting ground for the surviving large fish and alligators. Temporarily.

And, of course, yes, it is very red around here, even in snowbird season but concentrating like the wetlands when we go home. We're here for the beautiful inexpensive views and because the wind on the coast interferes too much with my husband's fishing, although you may well have passed and waved at Crystal River. We may end up up your way eventually. Pink sounds good.

[LAS14]

50. "Average" is a specific, single number. It would be odd...

... for a region of the country to hit that number dead on.

[Straw Man]

61. "Average" could be a defined as a range of numbers.

It would make more sense to do it that way, since all the reported results are categorized in ranges. Also, a lot depends on how the lines of the sampling regions are drawn. It seems kind of arbitrary, but sociological stats often are, I guess.

[WoonTars]

26. That is quite surprising...

Especially So. Cal....

[Blue_true]

27. I live in the part of Florida straddling the orange and blue.

Looks about right to me, some people with confederate flag decals posted on stuff, but the majority of people have nothing on their cars but license plates. Local politics red-purple with lots of holyrollers of all races.

[lpbk2713]

44. Kind of funny how the blue and orange meet near Gainesville.

[Blue_true]

48. Gainesville and near suburbs is very liberal. Nearby

Towns east, west and and south of Hogtown, not so much. See that you are a Gator too. Tallahassee is great too just full of Noles, which sort of ruin things a little.

[kristopher]

28. The research doesn't support the title. Data correlates to population density not racism

The data correlates to population density as it measures the number of searches for "the N-word' by geographic area.

[yardwork]

62. Then this is pointless. Lol!

[Stinky The Clown]

30. What I see is (roughly) the Rust Belt

Lots of angry white guys watching their jobs move and their way of life slipping away. The human tendency in such situations is to look for an "other" to scapegoat.

[LaydeeBug]

31. Half of WVA is listed 'much less than average'. I call bullshit. nt

[NewDealProgressive]

33. As a Philadelphian I can attest to the enormous racism here.

It's not so much in the city proper though there is a lingering cloud of hate in the white neighborhoods but it's off the charts in the suburbs. Delco, Montco, Chester, South Jersey, you'd think you were in Mississippi sometimes.

It's disgraceful and embarrassing.

[athena]

39. I'm skeptical.

A person can be very racist and never use the N-word, let alone Google it. Even if Googling the N-word is correlated with a person's level of racism, it could simply be that more racists in the Northeast use Google than in the South or the West.

Just because something can be measured doesn't mean the measurement means anything, especially when what is being measured is something related to human behavior.

[bettyellen]

52. Also people interested in or studying sociology would google the word..

I don't think this is a valid way to measure racism.

[HopeAgain]

55. Yes, not exactly scientific...

[bettyellen]

56. People looking up rap lyrics or John Lennon quotes...

[HopeAgain]

57. Or the latest viral video of a Trump supporter rant... n/t

[bettyellen]

58. That too.

[Takket]

42. This "map" is a horrific miscarriage of science and statistics

It does not account for population density or the intention of the "googler". A perfect example of garbage in, garbage out.

I can make you a similar map of occurrences of people googling the word "rabbit" and present it to you as a map of places that love rabbits the most. But without knowing if the person is looking for a place to adopt or a recipe for Haasenfeffer the map is basically useless.

[athena]

49. I assumed it was at least normalized by population.

Even then, it would not necessarily correlate with racism, as I explained in my post above. If the results have not been divided by the total number of Googles from that area, it is totally garbage, not worth even discussing.

[AngryAmish]

45. Yeah, any map that does have Boston glowing hot is a shit map.

Most racist town in America, hands down.

[drmeow]

46. A very narrow definition

of racism.

[Shandris]

47. Smack dab in the middle of some deep red...

...and not even vaguely surprised in one way. In another way, pretty shocked. It's a weird dichotomy, you don't see any overt racism out and about usually, no N-words, none of that.

Apparently its mostly behind closed doors (for the places that I visit; obviously I can't patrol an entire city!).

Alternately, I'm oblivious in public. I usually am out to have fun and be vivacious, and that doesn't lend itself well to thoughtful study and observation.

[Botany]

51. Pomeroy, OH

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pomeroy,+OH/@39.0246827,-82.0592429,13z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x884887e0fc92456b:0xae59b26e64fecdca!8m2!3d39.0275781!4d-82.033752

BTW want the % of racist Americans? what % voted for trump?

[jberryhill]

53. This is stupid for two reasons

1. As pointed out upthread, the measure of "number of searches" is not normalized for population, so you pretty much get a population density map.

But the bigger reason it is stupid is:

2. How does "Google search for N-word" mean "person is racist" as opposed to "person was searching offensive words on Google just to see what comes up"?

[yardwork]

63. Agreed on both points. It is stupid.

[MuseRider]

54. Looks like everything North

and West of Texas and Oklahoma are doing very well. I keep hearing how bad Kansas is. Hmmmm. We do have Kobach and that should have skewed it some but it looks like it did not.

I am actually pretty amazed by this map. Move East everyone says, get out of the hell hole you live in everyone says. Well, it may be a hell hole in many ways but it looks better to me all the time. Inequality of any kind is what jolts my well being. I think I will stay put.

What really surprises me here are the Dakotas, Utah and especially Idaho.

[raccoon]

59. Same here--I am shocked, shocked to see no pink or red areas in the Northwest. Many right-wing

weirdos tend to congregate there.

[Butleli]

64. Pacific Northwest and mountains for sure

I am from the deep south, and was shocked by the casual racism in rural pnw and great big northwestern states, which felt more insidious than my home state... (I would mention I was from Alabama which would be replied with some gross comment on that fact alone) I am surprised they don't register at all with this specific metric; and bc there is very little diversity in that region.

[gopiscrap]

68. welcome to DU

[maveric]

60. Rhode Island?

I grew up in Merrimack Valley MA where it was extremely racist. Still is.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

69. i think this is a bad study and is not reflective of racism, which is systemic

and not just mean googling of the n word.