Most people reading this will heartily agree that white supremacy is bad for everyone. The many ways that racism hurts all of us, even white people, are well-documented. But there’s always some far right half-wit whose refrain echoes the most inane playground bully. “Prove it,” they say. Well, okay then. This new body of research suggests that even just living close to racists is bad for your physical and mental health.
The study, which was released today in the journal Health Psychology, analyzed data from 14 recent studies that had gathered data from Google, Twitter and other big-data sources, EurekAlert reported. Researchers used tens of millions of data points from internet searches, surveys and social media posts in order to measure community level racial prejudice. Some of the ways they used to determine racial prejudice included data from Google Trends on how often users searches included racial slurs and analyzed tweets that included negative perceptions of POC.
