The less there is the more we talk about it.

I saw this claim somewhere and had to check myself.  It's true.  The less racism there is, the more we talk about it.  Mentions of racism in books from 1900 to 2019.  

Click to enlarge.

By every measure conceivable, the reality of racism is a small fraction today of what it was in 1960, just before Jim Crow was slain.  Despite that reality, we talk about racism.

We talk about racism 27 times more in 2019 than we did in 1960.  But how much more or less racism is there?  Lynching's had already been stamped out by 1960.  All the obvious manifestations (employment discrimination, bank lending, residence, etc.) have been made illegal.  While there are still incidents as there are with any crime, they are dramatically below where they were in 1960.

Perhaps the closest proxy to racism is the number of hate crimes.  The data goes back only to 1996, a whole generation after the legal protections brought in 1965.  There are several issues, the principle ones being that not all crimes are reported to the FBI and that the definitional scope of what constitutes a hate crime has expanded over the years.

Even with those caveats, race-based hate crimes are down 30% since 1996.  

So racism-based crimes decline at least 30% but our discussion of them increases 2700%.  Something seems awry.