1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy fucking shit'

2/n Here's 'holy fucking shit' #1

#2

#3

#4

#5

(#6) So many of these graphs look the same that, without the title, it looks like I'm simply reposting a single chart

(#7) If you're looking for a job in a booming industry....

(#8) Some of these terms (such as the one below) turn up so many results that I had to limit the search to a single news source

(#9)

(#10)

#11

#12

#13 I was telling @rasmansa that I don't recall the term 'people of color' being used so frequently in previous years/decades. Maybe there's something to this...?

#14: One important thing to keep in mind is that only results for articles which LexisNexis has inventorized are going to turn up. For instance, the trend below technically begins in the 1980s; but only a handful of articles that LexisNexis has for this period mentions 'racism'.

#15: Clear Charlottesville effect

#16 Our future is intersectional

Have a couple more I'm currently working on (including political correctness). Anybody have any other suggestions?

#17 'Unconscious bias' is more frequency referred to than 'implicit bias', but had to check

#18 During the 90s, the number of articles (at least on LexisNexis) mentioning 'political correctness' ranged from 4 (1990) to 380 (1990). 2007 was the first year this number entered into the 1000s (1056), which is where it's stayed since 2013.

@C_Kavanagh You asked for RW-related terms. Here's one.

As some of you pointed out, any search term is likely to see an overtime increase (if only due to growth in the number of news outlets/publications). As such, I think it's better to limit the searches to single publications. So here's the trend for 'PC' in the NYT

And here's the number of NYT articles mentioning 'diversity'

Original NYT Racism graph was actually an undercount. The search was generated with racism in quotations (and quotations should only be used when connecting two words). Here's the corrected figure. Let me see if other graphs are similarly affected.

The 'privilege' NYT graph was also an undercount. Obviously, the word 'privilege' need not refer to social/racial privilege. I nevertheless find it interesting that its use has grown tremendously over the past few years. It could be just a coincidence, but I'm skeptical.

Update: Currently working on tallying the annual number of NYT articles between 1980-2018 so I can calculate percentages. The NYT doesn't make this information readily available so I have to 'cheat' by using noise words (e.g. 'the') as search terms.

Update #2: Okay, I've finished one of them. Once again, using 'the' as a search term, I tabulated the number of results for NYT each year between 1980-2018. In the end, it seems that 'racism' mentions grew both in absolute terms *and* as a percent of all listed articles.

For instance, for 2018, LexisNexis produces results for 113,596 articles--2.07% of which mentioned 'racism'

And another

And another

The frequency of 'diversity and inclusion' mentions in the NYT was always low. By 2016, though, 0.086% of articles mentioned it (up from 0.0257% in 2015)

NYT mentions of 'police brutality' reached roughly 0.37% of all articles (or search results) in 2018.

In hindsight, I should have done a combined search for 'racism' and 'racist' (instead I only pulled data on the former). Thus, here's the graph for mentions of 'racist'

Note that the slope begins pointing upward before 2015, which is consistent with my findings that the 'wokening' was underway before Trump entered the picture. https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1124463150307446784

Here's another new one

And another

This term was mentioned only 473 times overall--most of the articles of which were published only over the past few years.

Ran a combined search for this one (probably should have just used 'of color')

These terms saw 559 total mentions--most of which, once again, came over the past few years.

This is a less pronounced trend by comparison, though still some growth over the past few years

First NYT mention of LGBT (N=1,871) was in 2001

In response to @KatyaSedgwick's suggestion, I ran a combined LGBT + LGBTQ search. Such actually moves the first NYT appearance back to 1995 (though they didn't use the acronym. Impressed that Lexisnexis nonetheless caught it)

Someone requested a 'transgender' search. Here you go. First (and isolated) mention, believe it or not, was in 1986.

Also saw a request for 'safe space'. First (of 1,036) appearance of these words in the NYT was in a 1983 article on a school ('Safe Space') for the deaf. Something tells me the context of its usage has changed overtime. Anyways, here you have it.

Forgot to run the percentages for 'social justice' (which appears to be trending towards 1% of all NYT articles), so here

Oh, to clear up any confusion: I shifted over to percentages vs. absolute numbers out of concern that the trends were largely a function of increases in NYT article output.

Clear Trump/travel ban effect here, though some small degree of growth in the preceding years.

Also forgot to graph for percentages for 'whiteness' (see below). Someone asked me why I didn't calculate the percentages for some of the non-NYT graphs. Short answer: tallying the annual # of NYT articles is a lot more manageable than tallying the annual # of ALL news articles.

Just pulled this one out of my critical theory hat

For comparison, I graphed some random control terms https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1134004282683011072

This graph was the result of a coding error. So as to not mislead (60%?!!), I've deleted it. On your right is the corrected figure

Could very well be a spurious correlation (r=0.714), but the number of monthly NYT articles mentioning 'racism' does correspond to increased Google search interest (note that GoogleTrends begins in 2004, so I had to limit the data accordingly)

Some potentially relevant contextual data: the percent of people saying they regularly read NYT roughly doubled between 2012-2016. Nearly all of this growth occurred among digital readers (i.e. those who visit NYTOnline).

I cross-verified this increase with data from Statista (though it only begins in 2014)

Readership seems to have doubled across the board, but liberals (16%->31%) still (naturally) constitute the majority of readers.

This might be relevant insofar as a) perceptions of the prevalence of discrimination among liberals saw tremendous increases across this period, and b) there's a robust relationship between NYT readership and perceiving more discrimination

Some of you requested it, so here it is

If conservatives would just have more empathy, we could finally redistribute all the wealth, dissolve the borders, pay reparations, sign the GND, and live in an egalitarian multicultural utopia.

As with racism, the number of monthly NYT articles mentioning 'empathy' closely tracks (r=0.825) Google searches for 'empathy'

This is over *all* newspaper results per year (not just NYT).

I knew it

LexisNexis shows results for 190 NYT articles referring to African American enslavement in 2012. That number grew to 805 in 2018.

White people have never been more popular. Number of articles mentioning between 2011-2018: 507 (2011), 547 (2012), 577 (2013), 843 (2014), 851 (2015), 1,476 (2016), 1,681 (2017), 2018 (1,827).

Made this one for you @PsychRabble. Unfortunately, I could find only 3 listings (overall) for 'stereotype accuracy'

This one probably took the longest to put together. Since 2016, NYT has published roughly 15-30 articles a day that mention these terms, as compared to 2-4 a day in the 1980s.