Study finds Black mortality proportional to Google searches of the 'n-word'
In the midst of rioting in Baltimore and heated nature of conversations regarding race, it is relevant to note a University of Maryland study published last week in the journal PLOS ONE. Researchers examined “levels of racism,” quantified by the proportion of Google searches containing the “n-word,” for whether it was a predictor of Black mortality.
Previous research pinpoints racism as a contributing factor to the mortality gap between people of color and white people, but these studies have relied heavily on patient interviews, in other words, asking people whether they have experienced racial discrimination. Self-reporting aside, racist behavior is not always explicit or overt enough to be noticed by a patient. As David Chae, assistant professor of epidemiology and lead author put it “Contemporary forms of racism are more subtle, and people may not recognize that the social insults they experience are driven by discrimination or prejudice.”
The thinking behind using geographic internet-search data is that higher instances of searching for the “n-word” may reflect more well-concealed instances of racism. The study does not assume that all searches containing that word are motivated by racism, instead it assumes that higher relative concentrations of the searches likely occur in places with higher instances of racism.
The results were significant: Black mortality rates in 196 different media markets, as collected by the National Center of Health Statistics, are 8.2% higher in places with a one-standard-deviation increase in area level racism- roughly equivalent to 30,000 additional deaths annually. The researchers took into account demographic and socioeconomic characteristics such as education and poverty in their calculation and still determined a significant correlation between high levels of area racism and Black mortality. Part of an attempt to control for variables included an adjustment to express Black mortality as a relative value to White mortality indicate the persistence and breadth of a gap in values.
Quantifying the impact of abstract pressures like racism is difficult in academia. Correlation does not equal causation and while the researchers in this case controlled for as many variables as they could, studies like this do need to be read with a certain grain of salt. In this case the numbers are reasonably strong and certainly warrant further investigation. Creative research that takes advantage of the wealth of data at our disposal can definitely begin to guide policies and resolve lingering issues such as discernible mortality gaps between races.
Image is from the study which can be read here.
I hear that the n-word is common in rap lyrics.
They tried to account for that somewhat:
“More colloquial forms of the “N-word” (i.e., ending in -a or -as) were not included given prior analysis of top searches revealing that these versions were used in different contexts compared to searches of the term ending in -er or -ers”
More common in rap lyrics in the South and Ohio? You’d think people would be searching rap lyrics all over and that variable would wash out.
I’d think that places with more Blacks would have more searches for rap lyrics and songs like “Ni**as in Paris” by Kanye West and Jay-Z, which has more than 94 million views on YouTube.
But that’s one of the “more colloquial forms of the ‘N-word’ (i.e., ending in -a or -as),” and the study controlled for the demographics, and if I’m reading it right, the biggest covariate was not the percent of the population that’s black, or even the poverty among blacks, but the mortality rate of whites. So places with more searches for the n-word have a higher mortality rate among blacks and whites, but especially blacks.
Bear in mind that they’re examining mortality from disease, not just violence.
For some reason, “Area racism was significantly associated with Black mortality rates for heart disease and stroke” but “Area racism was not significantly associated with diabetes mortality rates.”
Max, I think I can think of an explanation for the lack of significant association between area racism and diabetes mortality rates. Diabetes is more prevalent in the black population* and is better managed, perhaps due to education aimed specifically at that population because of the increased prevalence**.
*I did a very informal search for statistics by ethnicity for rates of diabetes and without doing any math as 7.6% of non-hispanic whites (Americans are so funny -by measures of funny that include awfully racist- in not including ‘hispanic’ in the ‘white’ population) and 13.2% of non-hispanic blacks (similarly funny) have the disease by percentage of population it does disproportionately affects blacks, at least as they are defined by the NIH.
**pure speculation, admittedly.
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In any case, it does seem like a reasonable hypothesis to base the research on; that searches for the ‘n-word’ would be more prevalent in places where there is more racism.. Certainly, the correlation is compelling.
What I find interesting are the connections that this research could make with research into insitutionalised and concealed racism and the effects they have on the outcomes for black people that are correlated to factors like poverty, education and the like.
There’s opportunity here for studies looking at connecting various research efforts, perhaps even in establishing a causative (or probably causative) link (and that despite the obvious difficulties in doing so) between mortality and those factors combined.
This map clearly illustrates that the South is the worst part of America. Couple that with the heat, humidity, poverty, ignorance, intolerance, and that stupid accent and I cannot see why any educated person would choose to stay there. It’s not a place that produces rocket scientists by any stretch of the imagination.
I don’t think this map shows that at all. I think what it shows is high concentrations of racists in the midwest and northeast, which is contrary to what most people, yourself probably included, believe – Racism exists in the South because southerners are dumb. Looks to me like there are dumb racists spread across the eastern portion of this country.
Educated people stay in the South because we don’t believe we should abandon the cause of working for racial justice. And they could be seen as even more committed because they are up against such an enormous challenge, yet they stay and fight.
I dont understand why everyone is automatically trying to deny this.. Why arent they asking themselves why other areas dont have higher cases of the N-word?
“Correlation does not imply causation is a quip that events or statistics that happen to coincide with each other are not necessarily causally related. The reality is that cause and effect can be indirect and due to a third factor known as confounding variables, or entirely coincidental and random. The assumption of causation is false when the only evidence available is simple correlation. To prove causation, a controlled experiment must be performed.”
There are many spurious correlations
http://tylervigen.com/
As example, the per capita consumption of cheese correlates (Correlation: 0.947091) with the number of deaths caused by people becoming entangled in their bedsheet.
I think the study should also take into account the fact that the majority of black homicides are caused by other black people. I mention this because there seems to be an implicit suggestion in the article that black people are being killed by racist white people. In fact, the vast majority of people (white, black, or hispanic) are killed by members of their own race; people who live in their own communities. This makes me think that something more complex is going on. As mentioned in the article, poverty and lack of education could be causal agents in producing higher crime (including homicide) as well as causing racism. Also, while the article suggests that racism is a cause of higher homicide rates, it’s obvious that the reverse is also true: higher crime rates and homicide rates in black communities is going to be a cause of racism against black people. The cause and effect here are complicated and cyclical.
Could it be that the cause and effect works both ways – i.e. that people are more racist towards black people when they live near high-crime black neighborhoods?