> My own suspicion is that it's probably more a matter of simply close 'proximity' combined with the natural difficulty of starting those relationships in the first place.
I see what you're saying, and I think you'd likely be correct. Would be interesting to see how high of a difference that might potentially be, would need the hard data instead of an infographic unfortunately :/
That's an interesting question. It would be illustrative to get the data for that. My own wager would be that it is slightly higher... just as searches by whites on 'Asian' is slightly higher in California than it is in ... say ... North Dakota. But that data would be telling.
In any case... I do agree with you that it's not "cross burning racism" that is driving these searches. My own suspicion is that it's probably more a matter of simply close 'proximity' combined with the natural difficulty of starting those relationships in the first place.
But of course data would be needed to validate any of this.