I have the exact same problem, I'm sure that there are many racists in our country, but this graphic is pretty garbage.
1) There are about 35 to 40 million Americans on Twitter, (15% of the 78.1% of online Americans).
2) Does the percentage of twitter users per state factor into this, it seems not.
3) "A score of 1.0 indicates that a state has relatively the same number of hate speech tweets as its total number of tweets. Scores above 1.0 indicate that hate speech is more prevalent than all tweets". This makes no sense to me, unless a single tweet somehow counts multiple times, e.g. "obama monkey monkey monkey monkey". There are more racists tweets than tweets? How is that possible?
4) Is every instance of "monkey" racist? Is it racist to call George Bush a monkey?
5) Was context applied, or is simply using certain word combinations racist? Go to twitter and do the search yourself, many of the tweets are responses to racist tweets or not racist at all.
I'm sure there are many racists in America, but this graphic is painting a very misleading picture.