The most racist places in America, according to Google(washingtonpost.com) |
The most racist places in America, according to Google(washingtonpost.com) |
There's more to racism than just this, but in America, racism tends to increase with proximity. More diversity in a community leads to less trust between (and within) ethnic groups.
The visualization also excludes the middle (that is, there is no color band centered on the middle, everything is forced into "below" or "above" average); if you view it as "most of the state outside the central/north coast is around the national average, and the central/north coast and a small part of the interior is notably below that" its not really all that surprising of a result.
Robert Putnam is the political scientist who's done the most work on this, and if you're curious, his most relevant paper is probably 'E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century'.
Putnam is an interesting academic - he was (and still is, I believe) utterly dismayed by the results of his research, but decided to publish it anyway.
It might, but racial proximity in America often doesn't involve much integration, it is proximity of communities segregated by a combination of voluntary choice and informal discrimination. On the black/white divide specifically, there are in many areas strong cultural forces on both sides working against integration, and making it so that proximity increases conflict which reinforces hostile attitudes on both sides.