Where's Charleston? Most Racist Cities in the United States Revealed [MAP]

Have you ever wondered which is the most racist states in the United States? The highest concentration of racist people live in the rural Northeast as well as the rural South, according to a recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE.

There is a heavy concentration along the spine of the Appalachians running from Georgia up to New York and southern Vermont, according to a report published by PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, reports the Washington Post.

"Racially motivated experiences of discrimination impact health via diminished socioeconomic attainment and by enforcing patterns in racial residential segregation, geographically isolating large segments of the Black population into worse neighborhood conditions," the authors write, summarizing existing research. "Racial discrimination in employment can also lead to lower income and greater financial strain, which in turn have been linked to worse mental and physical health outcomes," according to the report in the Washington Post.

The researchers divided the U.S. up into 196 different areas and tracked how often inhabitants in each one searched for the N-word on Google. The methodology comes from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

Using this method, researchers found that the rural Northeast (Western Massachusetts falls into this category) and the South are the most racist areas of the United States.

"Google data, evidence suggests, are unlikely to suffer from major social censoring," Stephens-Davidowitz wrote in a previous paper. "Google searchers are online and likely alone, both of which make it easier to express socially taboo thoughts. Individuals, indeed, note that they are unusually forthcoming with Google."

Stephens-Davidowitz also notes that the Google measure correlates strongly with other standard measures social science researchers have used to study racist attitudes.

"Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks," the authors conclude. Now, of course, Google searches aren't directly leading to the deaths of African Americans. But previous research has shown that the prevalence of racist attitudes can contribute to poor health and economic outcomes among black residents.