None of that makes me say "holy fucking shit" (linked author's words). For example, that systemic racism was effectively unmentioned in news articles until 2012

None of that makes me say "holy fucking shit" (linked author's words). For example, that systemic racism was effectively unmentioned in news articles until 2012 is not at all surprising to me. Rather, the media (and public discourse in general) just recently started to acknowledge issues that have been around forever, but haven't been addressed before. There's a lot of selection bias there. I bet if a similar chart was created for "civil rights", there'd be a peak in the 1960s. Or maybe if the charts were normalized to the number of articles per year, the charts would look much less exponential. It's hard to say. And actually, if you read #14, you see the twitter thread has a major issue - where it lacks data from the earlier years of the trends. That effectively renders it no more worthy than an anecdote.