For many, an even more important factor when moving than finding a home close to schools, hospitals and an abundance of delicious, delicious pizza, is finding a tolerant community where people aren't constantly throwing around racial slurs like it's no big deal. That's why apartment finder site Abodo put together this study looking at which states send the most racist tweets in America, hopefully as a way to see where such sentiment actually exists.
So what did they find? The study looked at how many tweets were sent with the N-word as well as several other racial slurs against black people per 100,000 tweets. West Virginia rose to the top of the list (in a bad way), with Maine sending the least racist tweets.
West Virginia shows the highest rate by far, with 83.2 per 100,000 tweets containing these slurs. In second and third place are Maryland and Louisiana, with 36.5 and 31.3 per 100,000. Excluding states with very small sample sizes, Idaho places last with 2.4 tweets per 100,000, followed by Maine with 2.7.
It's not perfect science. As Slate pointed out, just because a slur was used doesn't mean it was necessarily used in a racist way. The study could not filter out slurs that have been reclaimed and are being used by black people themselves. That could explain why when the study breaks down the data by city, places like Baltimore, Atlanta and New Orleans, which all have huge black populations, were among the worst offenders.
That, however, is not the story in West Virginia, which does not have a large population of black people. More than 93 percent of the state's population is white, according to 2014 census data, yet West Virginia still tweets more racial slurs than any U.S. state. You can read into those numbers what you want.
