

The most racist places in America, according to Google - fortepianissimo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/28/the-most-racist-places-in-america-according-to-google/?postshare=7781430242128505%3Flink%3Dmktw

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libc
I wish the article had explained how the individual regions on the map are
determined. It probably has to do with how the searches are geo-located but it
seems like it could've skewed the results for some places.

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gyardley
They look like Neilsen's Designated Market Areas to me - that weird little
square one around Alpena, Michigan is a pretty strong indicator.

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woodchuck64
For California, that above average outlier appears to be counties Orange, Los
Angeles, Ventura, San Bernadino and Inyo. Wonder what that's all about?

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gyardley
It's an area in California with a lot of black people.

There's more to racism than just this, but in America, racism tends to
increase with proximity. More diversity in a community leads to less trust
between (and within) ethnic groups.

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woodchuck64
I would have thought proximity could also ease tension if there is a degree of
integration. This theory can be confirmed or rejected by extending the
original research to cover more races.

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gyardley
That's called the 'contact hypothesis'. There's been a few studies that
support it (including a famous one involving WWII soldiers' attitudes to
mixed-race platoons) but most social science research has found the opposite.

Robert Putnam is the political scientist who's done the most work on this, and
if you're curious, his most relevant paper is probably 'E Pluribus Unum:
Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century'.

Putnam is an interesting academic - he was (and still is, I believe) utterly
dismayed by the results of his research, but decided to publish it anyway.

