Class and the language of social justice

How income relates to proficiency in social justice terminology.

I’ve come across a fascinating survey that seems to have flown under the radar, presumably because it was released just after Donald Trump’s election. Last November, YouGov asked respondents to rate their familiarity with a whole battery of terms related to social justice — words like “intersectionality” and “misogynoir”. Most of the findings struck me as obvious: few Americans use any of these words, and those who do tend to be Democrats.

Browsing through the crosstabs, however, I noticed another trend. The chart below shows the margin of familiarity each income bracket has with each word; negative familiarity means that more respondants haven’t heard of the word than have heard of the word. Note that “familiarity with” is different from “use of”; here I am interested in whether people know the word even if they don’t use it.