Where the Racists Are

With Connie Francis' iconic Where the Boys Are running through my head, I write to share a clever piece of high tech social science research, reported by the Wonkblog at The Washington Post. It involves using Google searches to determine where the most racist people live.

The methodology is simplicity itself, checking number of searches for topics including the infamous "n-word," a corruption of the word "negro." Only those in which the word ends in "er" are utilized. Those in which the word ends in "a" are found not to be per se evidence of racism, as they probably come from rap lyrics.

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.

Other hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio. But the searches get rarer the further West you go. West of Texas, no region falls into the "much more than average" category.

As a Westerner, I'm pleased to see our necks aren't terribly red.