I found only one article See Jason Lisk, “Quarterbacks and Whether Race Matters,” The Big Lead, December 2, 2010, thebiglead.com/2010/12/02/quarterbacks-and-whether-race-matters/. Of course, the fact that I found only one writer who calculates quarterback rating by race is hardly proof that no other writer has made the calculation. However, I spent several hours combing results and found only Lisk.
the four largest racial groups 15 percent of OkCupid users who select an ethnicity select more than one race; 3 percent select a race other than the four largest. These people are excluded from the analysis, as are people who neglected to choose a race at all.
“normalize” each row I normalized against the simple average in each row, rather than the weighted average. Because of the preponderance of white people, the latter technique would’ve skewed the matrix, functionally using what everyone thinks of white people as the “norm.” A simple average captures the following: “When a person of race A meets an arbitrary person of race B, how does A appraise B, relative to A’s appraisals of other races?” That’s the interesting question, and what we want to investigate.
There is no cadre of racists An analysis of individual bias applied by non-black men to black female profiles shows a median deduction of 0.6 stars, with most of the sample applying a deduction from 0.2 to 1.0 stars. 82 percent of the sample shows at least some consistent anti-black bias.
Here are our numbers Though the numbers I list for OkCupid here were generated from internal data, you can see those numbers corroborated and compared to Quantcast’s national averages by visiting https://www.quantcast.com/okcupid.com?country=US. Select “Ethnicity” from the Demo-graphics menu and expand the “US average” feature.
OkCupid users putting it in their own words These excerpts are from user-submitted “Success Stories” published on the site. Bella and Patrick’s is here: https://www.okcupid.com/success/story?id=2855. Dan and Jenn’s is here: https://www.okcupid.com/success/story?id=2587.
“There are very few” Barack Obama’s quote is excerpted from his comments on the George Zimmerman verdict: whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin.
One paper asked See “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (2004): 991–1013, doi: 10.1257/0002828042002561.
Osagie K. Obasogie My discussion of Obasogie’s work relies on Francie Latour’s Boston Globe article “How Blind People See Race,” January 19, 2014. Latour provides a précis of Obasogie’s book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), and interviews him.
Baywatch I was in Japan in 1992. Baywatch was popular worldwide by then, but didn’t arrive in the Japanese mainstream until a year later. Nonetheless, surf culture, California, and sun-kissed blondness were already everywhere. When you walked into a “cool” clothing store, they’d be playing the Beach Boys. In 1992. Stuff like “Surfin’ Safari,” not “Kokomo.”
Chapter 7: The Beauty Myth in Apotheosis
Korean proverb I got this from William Manchester’s biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar (New York: Little, Brown, 1978), which, in the death throes of this book, I was reading to get my mind off data.
beauty operates on a Richter scale I was already familiar with the logarithmic nature of the Richter scale, but relied on the Wikipedia entry for “Richter magnitude scale” to understand the implications of the benchmark magnitudes. In comparing beauty to the scale, I am, of course, employing a bit of poetic license; the functions are not exactly the same.
Here is data for interview requests The Shiftgig data was provided by their data team and with the gracious cooperation of founder Eddie Lou.
And for friend counts These are the aggregated and anonymized friend counts for OkCupid users who’ve elected to connect their OkCupid accounts to their Facebook accounts.
a foundational paper of social psychology See “What Is Beautiful Is Good,” by Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 285–90.
It was the first in a now long line … This passage adapts conclusions from and directly quotes “Pretty Smart? Why We Equate Beauty with Truth,” by Robert M. Sapolsky, in the Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2014. The Duke neuropsychologists alluded to are Takashi Tsukiura and Roberto Cabeza. See also “Jurors Biased in Sentencing Decisions by the Attractiveness of the Defendant” at Psychology and Crime News for an overview of the effects of physical attractiveness in the criminal justice process: crimepsychblog.com/?p=1437, posted by user EmmaB, April 3, 2007.
both Tumblr and Pinterest See “A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs,” Tumblr’s staff blog, March 1, 2012, staff.tumblr.com/post/18132624829/self-harm-blogs.
See also “Pinterest ‘Thinspiration’ Content Banned According to New Acceptable Use Policy,” by Ellie Krupnick, Huffington Post, March 26, 2012, huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/26/pinterest-thinspiration-content-banned_n_1380484.html.
The Huffington Post has actively covered the “thinspiration” phenomenon. See “The Hunger Blogs: A Secret World of Teenage ‘Thinspiration,’ ” by Carolyn Gregoire, February 8, 2012, huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/thinspiration-blogs_n_1264459.html.
For more on “thighgap” (and for evidence that altering the Terms of Service did not solve the problem), see “The Sexualization of the Thigh Gap,” by Allie Jones, on The Wire, November 22, 2013, thewire.com/culture/2013/11/sexualization-thigh-gap/355434/.
Chapter 8: It’s What’s Inside That Counts
That’s been the popular standard since These basic facts on the origins of Gallup were found on the “Gallup (company)” Wikipedia entry.
surveys have historically As I mention in the text and in the footnotes to this chapter, the idea of using Google Trends to look at taboos is the brainchild of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. His June 9, 2012, article in the New York Times, “How Racist Are We? Ask Google,” and his 2013 Harvard PhD dissertation, “Essays Using Google Data,” http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10984881, were the inspiration for this chapter. For the question of exactly how much Obama’s race cost him in the 2008 election, picked up later in the chapter, I rely directly on Stephens-Davidowitz’s work. For the over-time use of the word “nigger” and in the other direct citations of Google Trends findings in the chapter, the work is my own, though I am adapting a method he first suggested.
Though Stephens-Davidowitz now works at Google, I emphasize that his search research is always based on public and anonymous sources, not on privileged access to anyone’s personal search history. My own search research is similarly based on a public, anonymous source, namely Google Trends: google.com/trends.
This tendency is called I used Wikipedia’s “Social desirability bias” entry as my source for basic details here.
The most famous case The Bradley effect first came to my attention during the 2008 campaign, as pundits wondered how it would affect Obama’s polling on Election Day. Here, I relied on the Wikipedia entry “Bradley effect” for basic facts surrounding Tom Bradley’s defeat.
Since the service launched See Nick Bilton, “Google Search Terms Can Predict Stock Market, Study Finds,” New York Times Bits blog, April 26, 2013. See also Casey Johnston, “Google Trends Reveals Clues About the Mentality of Richer Nations,” Arstechnica, April 5, 2012, arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/google-trends-reveals-clues-about-the-mentality-of-richer-nations/; and Tobias Preis et al., “Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward,” Scientific Reports 2, no. 350 (2012), doi: 10.1038/srep00350.
track epidemics of flu Google Flu was first developed in the paper “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data,” by Jeremy Ginsberg et al. in Nature 457 (2009): 1012–14, doi:10.1038/nature07634. Recently, Flu’s efficacy has been found wanting: see Kaiser Fung, “Google Flu Trends’ Failure Shows Good Data > Bi
g Data,” Harvard Business Review Blog Network, March 25, 2014.
included in 7 million searches a year Stephens-Davidowitz, “How Racist Are We?”
more American than “apple pie” Google Trends index for US searches, January 2004–September 2013, for “apple pie”: 25. For “nigger”: 32.
And, tellingly The ratio of “nigga”:“nigger” is thirty times higher in tweets sent from my Twitter corpus than reflected in Google Trends. That is, on Twitter “nigger” appears thirty times less frequently.
roughly 1 in 100 searches for “Obama” Stephens-Davidowitz shared this fact with me over e-mail.
25 percent below the pre-Obama status quo Stephens-Davidowitz, “How Racist Are We?” This is also confirmable firsthand through Google Trends.
Other awful terms These racial epithets are far less common on Twitter, in private messages to OkCupid, and in Google search, as confirmed by Stephens-Davidowitz via e-mail.
If you’re not familiar with autocomplete The algorithm that supplies Google autocomplete is the blackest of the black boxes. There is little definitive information on how it works. Danny Sullivan at searchengineland.com offers a thorough, if mostly ad hoc, overview at searchengineland.com/how-google-instant-autocomplete-suggestions-work-62592. Because autocomplete seems to factor in your personal search history, individual results are highly variable here. If you try to replicate my results for yourself, make sure to use an “Incognito” session of Chrome, as I did, so that Google has no prior personal data to work with. If you’re a Safari user, select “Private Browsing.”
one such result See Paul Baker and Amanda Potts, “ ‘Why Do White People Have Thin Lips?’ Google and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes Via Auto-Complete Search Forms,” Critical Discourse Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 187–204.
Go to your search bar with This long string of queries was suggested to me by Sean Mathey, on the van ride home following a camping trip where we played a lot of Magic: the Gathering.
I’ll let Republican strategist Lee Atwater explain See Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation, November 13, 2012, thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy. Original quote from Alexander P. Lamis’s book The Two-Party South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), via Wikiquote’s “Lee Atwater” entry.
Consider two media markets Stephens-Davidowitz, “How Racist Are We?”
In my opinion, Muhammad Ali I read David Remnick’s King of the World (New York: Random House, 1998) in 1999 and have admired Ali since. I verified certain basic facts surrounding Ali’s Vietnam protest using his Wikipedia entry. For Ali’s famous quote on the Viet Cong, I went with the popular and much more pithy misquotation of his actual words, which were, “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” The misquotation is identical in spirit, yet so much shorter and so much better known, that I decided it was acceptable in place of the actual quote.
You can hear him say those words (the longer quote) himself in the YouTube video “Muhammad Ali on the Vietnam War-Draft” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFMyrWlZ68. In that video, he seems to be speaking right after a fight, and his speech is slow and deliberate. Hear him speak much more fluently on the same topic two years later in “Muhammad Ali Interview with Ian Wooldridge (1969)” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLam_GiQ2Ww.
Chapter 9: Days of Rage
Safiyyah Nawaz tweeted a silly joke My sources for information on Safiyyah and for the tweets surrounding her ordeal were:
Neetzan Zimmerman, “Teen Posts Joke on Twitter, Internet Orders Her to Kill Herself,” Gawker, January 2, 2013, gawker.com/1493156583.
Ryan Broderick, “Meet the 17-Year-Old Girl Who Stood Up to Death Threats After Her Tweet Went Viral on New Year’s Eve,” BuzzFeed, January 2, 2014, buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/meet-the-17-year-old-girl-who-stood-up-to-death-threats-afte.
Ryan Broderick, “After Twitter Started Viciously Attacking Her over a Silly Joke, This Girl Handled It Like a Champ,” BuzzFeed, January 2, 2014, buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/after-twitter-started-attacking-her-over-a-silly-joke-this-g.
These articles put her retweet number at 14,000, but they were all published just a day later. My 16,000 was accurate as of mid-January 2014.
Katy Perry/Lady Gaga The counts of the retweets for their “Happy New Year” tweets were accurate as of mid-January 2014 and have most likely gone up somewhat in the time since.
comedian Natasha Leggero My sources for Leggero’s joke and the subsequent uproar were:
“ ‘I’m Not Sorry’: Comedian Natasha Leggero Refuses to Apologize Mocking Pearl Harbor Survivors on NBC,” by that legendary gumshoe “DAILY MAIL REPORTER.” Mail Online, January 4, 2014, dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2533809/.
Ross Luippold, “Natasha Leggero’s Stunning ‘Not Sorry’ Response over Controversial Pearl Harbor Joke,” Huffington Post, January 4, 2014, huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/04/natasha-leggero-not-sorry-for-pearl-harbor-joke_n_4541354.html.
The derogatory tweets sent to Leggero were taken from a letter she published on her Tumblr: natashaleggero.com/letter/.
Pictures of her family Justine’s tweet and the outrage surrounding it were covered extensively. A decent overview of the uproar is here: “Justine Sacco: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,” by Matthew Guariglia, on Heavy, December 21, 2013, heavy.com/news/2013/12/justine-sacco-iac-racist-pr-tweet-africa/.
“This Is How a Woman’s Offensive Tweet Became the World’s Top Story,” by Alison Vingiano, on BuzzFeed, is a more thorough survey, though one that conveniently omits BuzzFeed’s own role in cheering on the mob: buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/this-is-how-a-womans-offensive-tweet-became-the-worlds-top-s.
“The Case of Justine Sacco and the Twitter Lynch Mob,” by Sharon Waxman, in The Wrap, is a piece by someone who, like me, had worked with Justine: thewrap.com/case-justine-sacco-twitter-lynch-mob/.
“Justine Sacco: How to Kill a Career with One Tweet,” by Juana Poareo, is one of many pitiless articles, replete with screenshots of Justine’s tweets in the aftermath. The Guardian, “Liberty Voice,” December 22, 2013, guardianlv.com/2013/12/justine-sacco-how-to-kill-a-career-with-one-tweet/.
A screenshot of Google’s involvement in #HasJustineLandedYet can be found at “Justine Sacco Saga Sparks Criticism of Twitter Lynch Mob,” by Lauren O’Neil, on CBCnews.com: cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/12/justine-sacco-saga-sparks-criticism-of-twitter-lynch-mob.html.
the Internet waited dry-mouthed Here, though there were many thousands of mean-spirited tweets to choose from in my data pull, I chose to print only tweets that had already been published by other sources:
@RonGeraci’s tweet appears on his blog, The Minty Plum, in a thoughtful piece, “View from the Pitchfork Mob,” January 12, 2014, the mintyplum.com/?p=486.
@noyokono’s tweet appears in Frazier Tharpe, “PR Woman Tweets Racist Joke Before Flight, Twitter Waits for Her to Land and Get Fired,” Complex.com, December 21, 2013, complex.com/pop-culture/2013/12/justine-sacco-racist-tweet/.
@Kennymack1971’s tweet appears in the Sharon Waxman article cited above, “The Case of Justine Sacco and the Twitter Lynch Mob.”
her father isn’t a billionaire Alec Hogg, “Rubbish Rumours. Tweeting Idiot Justine Sacco No Relation to Desmond Sacco, SA Mining Billionaire,” Biz News.com, December 27, 2013, biznews.com/tweeting-idiot-justine-sacco-no-relation-to-desmond-sacco-sa-mining-billionaire/.
The reach of social media This research did not use our usual randomized Twitter corpus. We instead opted for a completist approach. For these numbers and the related chart, my team and I pulled every retweet of Safiyyah’s jo
ke and #HasJustineLandedYet. These numbers reflect our best estimates of who saw each.
Marine biologists Alan Yu, “More Than 300 Sharks in Australia Are Now on Twitter,” All Tech Considered, December 31, 2013, NPR, npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/12/31/258670211/.
Rumors are mentioned My source for the history and science of rumors is Jesse Singal’s piece “How to Fight a Rumor,” Boston Globe, October 12, 2008, boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/10/12/how_to_fight_a_rumor/. The insight to connect rumors and social media virulence is his. He also quotes the “a man who lacks judgment …” passage from the Bible. “Judge not …” is my own addition, as is the “demon Rumor.”
I also used “Rumor, Gossip and Urban Legends,” by Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, in Diogenes 54, no. 1 (2007): 19–35, and Mr. DiFonzo’s article “Rumour Research Can Douse Digital Wildfires” in Nature 493, no. 7431 (2013): 135.
a phenomenon first studied I was led to Suler’s work from Penny Arcade. I drew basic facts on Suler and the online disinhibition effect from the Wikipedia entry for “Online disinhibition effect,” which links to the comic. The comic itself is here: penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19.
The old CB radio channels I became aware of this fact through the Wikipedia entry for “Online disinhibition effect,” which cites Kenneth Tynan, “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1978, as the original source.
the Jerky Boys For anyone interested in the world of phone-call humor, Longmont Potion Castle is the Mitch Hedberg to the Jerky Boys’ Dane Cook. I could never recommend the Longmont Potion Castle II album strongly enough.
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) Page 21