Twitter Map Shows Blatant US Racism
If you sign up for an “Advanced Cartography” course at Humboldt State University, be warned that you’re not signing up to explore uncharted areas of the known world and track down Ponce de Leon’s rumored fountain of youth.
Instead, students enrolled in the course last semester charted maps of racism, using popular social media network Twitter. Called the “Geography of Hate,” their map was composed using 150,000 geo-coded tweets from June 2012-April 2013, each read and analyzed by human eyes (to avoid classifying statements such as “Using homo in a derogatory fashion is not okay” as hate speech).
A streak of western states, with the exception of lower Idaho, remained mostly light on hate-speech (though it was still present), while portions of the west coast and a good half the country from Kansas eastward was registered as blatantly homophobic and racist.
From the map, it would appear that the Southern states (excluding Southern California) are more varied in their bigotry—which is relatively unsurprising, let’s be honest. “Wetback” seems to be a more popular phrase than “YOLO” in certain parts of Texas.
To protect privacy, you can’t actually see any of the 150,000 tweets, but it’s not hard to believe that America is an inherently racist country.
The map charts the popularity of certain phrases in certain areas: homophobic phrases, such as dyke, fag, homo, and queer; racist names such as chink, gook, nigger, wetback, and spick; and demeaning words for the disabled, such as cripple.
