Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

by Christian Rudder

  There have been, in fact, only three true jumps in “nigger” searches during the Obama presidency. The first was driven by the kind of what-the-fact that Tea Party politicians seem to specialize in: volume spiked in October 2011, the week the world discovered that Texas governor Rick Perry has a “Niggerhead Lake” on his property. The remaining two peaks, both comparable to Obama’s election night in height and suddenness, were the bookends to a single story. The first hit the servers in late March 2012, and the other the last week of June the following year. They coincide with, first, Trayvon Martin’s parents bringing their son’s death to national attention, and, second, when the prosecution made its case against George Zimmerman—perhaps the two times since Obama’s first campaign that whiteness felt most attacked. There was no comparable spike during the defense phase of the proceedings, nor at the verdict. And, like they did in the aftermath of the 2008 election, searches hit a new low right after the acquittal, again showing the cycle of clench and catharsis that passes for race relations in the United States.

  When you’re out hunting for racially charged words, “nigger” is the obvious place to start, but very quickly you find there isn’t much else of significance out there; it’s really the alpha and omega of hate speech. Other awful terms like “spic” and “chink” are so seldom used that there’s comparatively little data to analyze. It’s not the epithets themselves that are the most meaningful, anyhow—it’s the mind-set behind them, a truth you can see in the way the freight of the word “nigger” changes with the identity of the speaker. If it were Toby Keith and not Nas releasing that album in 2008, you’d have a much different story on your hands. To that end, Google’s autocomplete function is useful; it gives whole thoughts rather than just a context-free word.

  If you’re not familiar with autocomplete, when you begin typing a phrase, for example “Who is the …” Google offers to finish your thought with the text from other popular searches. Type in “Who is the …” and it suggests “… richest man in the world.” Tinker with it a bit, and it’ll give you a peek at humanity wondering how the other half lives.

  Why do women …

  … cheat?

  … have periods?

  … wear high heels?

  Why do men …

  … pull away?

  … fall in love?

  … lie?

  And when you start fishing for stereotypes, it’s like playing the game Taboo, but without any taboos. Why do black people … like fried chicken? Why do Muslims … hate America? Why do Asians … look alike? Autocomplete gives you this kind of stuff—those are verbatim examples. In fact, one such result, “Why Do White People Have Thin Lips?,” is the title of a recent research paper that explores the dual purpose the feature serves: it reveals trends, of course, but because of Google’s ubiquity it has the power to set them as well. The paper suggests that autocomplete will eventually perpetuate the stereotypes it should only reflect, and it’s easy to see how: a user types an unrelated question, only to have other people’s prejudices jump in the way. For example, “Why do gay … couples look alike?” was not a stereotype I was aware of until just now. It’s the site acting not as Big Brother but as Older Brother, giving you mental cigarettes.

  When you turn the autocomplete queries inward, you get still another view of humanity. It’s like standing alongside someone in front of his bathroom mirror. Go to your search bar with:

  “Why is my a …” then

  “Why is my b …” and so on

  and Google will complete your prompts with an alphabet of troubles, including this brilliant run:

  why is my stool green

  why is my tongue white

  why is my urine cloudy

  why is my vagina itchy

  All of which ailments, I have to point out, are probably the result of sitting at a computer for too damn long.

  So in all these ragged ways, our hidden thoughts are becoming part of the world. With a little creative typing, a few workarounds, and some math, we are giving humanity’s inner monologue a wider audience. We bring out the hurtful as well as the ridiculous parts of ourselves, and for those hurtful impulses, search data provides much-needed exposure. It is no longer publicly acceptable to say racist things, but we can now know they’re still being spoken even when social desirability bias might tell us otherwise. Moreover, though our power to detect latent, hidden attitudes is new, our power to exploit them is not, which is why this data is all the more important. I’ll let Republican strategist Lee Atwater explain; below he’s discussing his party’s so-called Southern Strategy in an interview with political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. He said this in 1981, as a member of the Reagan administration:

  You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

  Atwater thought he was speaking off the record (“Now, y’all aren’t quoting me on this?”). Search data means we don’t have to wait for such accidents to examine the disconnect between the public and private conversation on a topic like race. It shows we’re heading toward a better world. It also shows we have far to go.

  Let’s pick up where we left Obama, on Inauguration Day, 2009. There was a lot of hopeful talk then that the United States had become a “post-racial” society, and it wasn’t necessarily a far-fetched idea. At its core, the “post-racial” story was an attempt to extrapolate the success of Obama’s campaign to other corners of American life, and to say that his victory proved that “race wasn’t a factor” in our lives, not anymore.

  Despite that hopeful possibility, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz at Google concluded that Obama’s race probably cost him 3 to 5 percentage points of the popular vote in 2008—and the loss wasn’t from Republicans but from people who otherwise would’ve voted for a white Democrat like John Kerry. At the high end of the range, that 5 percent swing would’ve altered well over half the elections since World War II, and it’s a result we could never have detected without search data. The researcher’s brainstorm was to go back before Obama entered the national political picture, to 2004–2007, and mine Google Trends for preexisting racial attitudes. (That keeps dislike of Obama himself from clouding the picture.) Using that data to get a state-by-state “racial animus index,” he could then compare that index against Obama’s eventual vote totals and against the expected outcome for a generic (i.e., white) Democratic candidate (for which of course there is ample previous data). Reliably, the higher the animus index, the worse Obama performed. Here’s an example of the method in the words of the man who did the work:

  Consider two media markets, Denver and Wheeling (which is a market evenly split between Ohio and West Virginia). Mr. Kerry received roughly 50 percent of the votes in both markets. Based on the large gains for Democrats in 2008, Mr. Obama should have received about 57 percent of votes in both Denver and Wheeling. Denver and Wheeling, though, exhibit different racial attitudes. Denver had the fourth lowest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won 57 percent of the vote there, just as predicted. Wheeling had the seventh highest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won less than 48 percent of the Wheeling vote.

  Historically, a presidential candidate can expect a modest boost, about 2 percentage points, in the popular vote in his home state. Because of racial animus, John McCain in 2008 had better than home-state advantage throughout the entire country. If you’re looking for evidence of whiteness as a leg-up in American life, this is it. McCain was the nation’s favorite son for no other reason than he was pitted against a black man.

  In my opinion, Muhammad Ali is one of the bravest Americans. In 1967, as heavyweight champion, he refused to serve in Vietnam and was not only strip
ped of his title but banned from the sport for three and a half years. He lost the prime of his career, and received a five-year prison sentence (that took the Supreme Court to overturn), because of what he believed in. It’s a stand unimaginable from today’s political leaders, let alone our athletes and celebrities. From Kanye to Glenn Beck to Rachel Maddow to Sarah Palin, you get plenty of anger, but little sacrifice. We can each have our own take on Ali’s stance against Vietnam—and as the son of a veteran, Huê´ ’69, I know at least one person who disagrees with mine—but data like this can help anyone understand why he took it. As Ali said at the time, “No Viet-Cong ever called me nigger,” and he was probably right. But imagine, had Google existed then, what would’ve been going into American search bars. And imagine the home-state disadvantage of a black man in those days.

  It remains to be seen where attitudes will go next. For all the above, Obama did win, and as depressing as some of this stuff is, there’s a lot to be encouraged about—for one thing, there was no evidence that bias hurt the president again in 2012, though he was a known quantity by then, perhaps less “a black man” than “Barack Obama.” One thing that gets lost in all the aggregation throughout this book is that on an individual level, the personal effects of these broad social forces are often very subtle. To speak to the data you’ve seen in a previous chapter, OkCupid’s many black users have a fine experience on the site—each one of them gets dates and rejection like anyone else. They just get, collectively, more of the latter. When you go person-by-person, any individual’s experience is too small and too varied to conclusively say anything “racial” has happened. It could be your skin, or it could be just you. On the other side of it, it’s laughable to think of one red-faced guy searching for “nigger jokes” because Barack Obama got elected. But it’s a lot less funny when you can see that he’s one of thousands and thousands making the same search. And it’s less funny still when you see the large effect these private attitudes can still have, even in public life. Thus the story of just one of us versus the story of us all. That’s why data like this is necessary—it ends arguments that anecdotes could never win. It provides facts that need facing.

  I know some people who only read good books—and by that I mean things that come recommended: by friends, teachers, reviewers, Amazon. It makes sense; reading is slow, time is precious, why risk it? But that’s not my style. I like history, and when I go to the bookstore, I just grab a bunch of random stuff from the section shelves and see what sticks. Reader, I have read some bullshit. And too many books on Napoleon. But among many serendipitous discoveries, A People’s History of the United States is my favorite. Yes, I know now it’s a classic, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’d never heard of the book until I pulled it down. Google Books describes it well: it’s a chronicle of “American history from the bottom up”—and where most books treat leaders and big events, A People’s History shows us the homes, shops, farms, factories, and smaller worries of yesteryear. The thing is, as much as I love that book, and as much as it turns the schoolhouse version of American history on its head, Howard Zinn could still only tell us what he could see, the observable actions, the words spoken aloud. The hearts of women and men were beyond him. In the stress of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the boredom of the trenches, in the liberation of the Pill—for all the moments of quiet joy and interior anguish lost to history, what if we had the data we have now? How much richer would our understanding be?

  1 Google Trends expresses a search’s popularity with a simple index number proportional to the number of searches for the word or phrase. The indices for this epithet are within 10 percent of each other for the listed metro areas. “Nigga” is not included, since most of its related searches are for rap lyrics (the exact search query for my data throughout this chapter was: “nigger −nigga −song”). The top related searches for “nigger” are, by far, “jokes” and “nigger jokes.” For my racial search analysis, I’m relying on a method originated by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist and economist at Google. Reporting from his inside view of the data, he writes: “A huge proportion of the searches [for “nigger”] were for jokes about African Americans.” He uses public and anonymous data for his research.

  2 This wasn’t just people going on vacation: neutral terms like “pasta,” “pizza,” “family,” and “truck” hold steady throughout the year.

  9.

  Days of Rage

  On New Year’s Eve, bored on her couch and waiting for the ball to drop, Safiyyah Nawaz tweeted a silly joke.

  $afiyyah @safiyyahn

  this beautiful earth is now 2014 years old, amazing

  She got 16,000 retweets, almost all of them in the next twenty-four hours. For reference, Katy Perry’s Happy New Year wish to her 49 million followers got just over 19,000. Lady Gaga’s, which also announced a long-awaited video, got 20,000. Safiyyah Nawaz is not some emerging world pop star, and this isn’t the story of Twitter empowering upstarts to challenge the cultural order. If you haven’t heard of Safiyyah, that’s because she’s a North Carolina high school student whose joke, the exact words above, made Twitter explode.

  At first it was people verbally scratching their heads, wondering if she was serious, but if you watch the tweets from that night go by, each retweeter a further degree removed from Safiyyah the human being, and each more aware that his or her ridicule was part of a phenomenon—this from watching the retweet number tick up—you can actually see the digital crowd become a mob. In short order, the amused LOLs became OMGs became WTFs, and then stuff like this took over:

  Cocaine Burger @Cocaine_Burger

  @safiyyahn Kill yourself

  Rick Huijbers @HARDEBAKSTEEN

  @safiyyahn kill yourself you stupid motherfuck

  It went, as Gawker put it in their coverage, from dumb to #dumbbitch in a matter of minutes. Given the violence of the reaction, Ms. Nawaz handled the experience pretty well for a seventeen-year-old, and later she sized up the outcry perfectly:

  $afiyyahn @safiyyahn

  young folks these days b really passionate about the tru age of the earth

  Nawaz was unaware of it, but she had famous company in the crosshairs. Just fifteen minutes before she’d tweeted her joke, comedian Natasha Leggero was in Times Square, on television with Carson Daly, bantering about the SpaghettiOs Pearl Harbor Day PR campaign. The brand had come under fire for encouraging citizens to remember the fallen via purchase of canned spaghetti—yes, this is what the world has come to—and she said, “It sucks that the only survivors of Pearl Harbor are being mocked by the only food they can still chew.”

  Host and guest laughed and moved on to other things, unaware that Natasha, too, had inadvertently brushed against the highly sensitive On switch of the Internet-rage machine. It sputtered into righteous action; Ms. Leggero later posted on Tumblr several choice examples of the tweets she got. Stuff like:

  Mike Oswald @SDPStudio

  @natashaleggero What a vile whore you are.

  Mark Tichenor @hotrod607

  @natashaleggero Fuck You, you disrespectful cunt

  And my personal favorite, which, should the Internet ever die, will be its epitaph:

  Chris McAllister @macdawg22

  @natashaleggero your a stupid ignorant whore.

  I was paying special attention to these two episodes because something similar had just happened to a coworker of mine. On December 20, Justine Sacco, who was director of communications at OkCupid’s parent company, IAC, was at Heathrow, waiting for a connecting flight to Johannesburg. She boarded the plane, sat down in her seat, and typed:

  Justine Sacco @justinesacco

  Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!

  Then she turned off her phone. Her tweet was less obviously a joke than the other two examples and at best—at best—it was a clumsy dig at white privilege. But what started with justified head-shaking at her cluelessness quickly became a carnival of intense personal hatred. She g
ot the usual threats and insults, but the attack aimed for more than her Twitter persona. Pictures of her family were circulated online, along with their whereabouts. Men called her nephews, threatening to rape them. People gathered at the Johannesburg airport to await her plane. Her inability to respond while aloft added an extra jolt of enthusiasm to the takedown. About midway through her flight #HasJustineLandedYet was coined and became a top trending topic on Twitter. Google searches for her name began to automatically return her flight number and its arrival time because that’s what people were searching for—search algorithms had again held up a mirror. For the eleven hours Justine hung in the air, the Internet waited dry-mouthed and bloodthirsty for the moment she would reconnect to find her life in ruins.

  Ron Geraci @RonGeraci

  It’s like 2 million people are waiting for her with the lights off to see her expression as the earth explodes.

  I’m Gary @noyokono

  #HasJustineLandedYet People haven’t eagerly anticipated a plane landing this much since Amelia Earhart.

  V. Hussein Savage @Kennymack1971

  Aw hell.… lemme finish this work grab a 6 pack and some BBQ wings. It’s about to be on…

  #HasJustineLandedYet

  Their quarry here was someone with a few hundred followers and no public profile. I didn’t know Justine all that well, but I had enjoyed working with her, and watching the obvious excitement people got from the pain and fear they were about to cause sickened me.

  Like a fool, I went to Facebook to vent. My post wasn’t up ten minutes before an acquaintance (and future former Facebook friend), who at that point I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years, commented “her father is a billionaire” and implied that that somehow justified her personal destruction.1 But of course her father isn’t a billionaire—that was just another rumor that had attached itself to the story. It was like running into a mob at a stoning, trying to drag people away, finding someone you know—whew, finally, a guy you can reason with—only to have him yell, wide-eyed, “Dude, check out all these rocks!”