Background: The objective of the current study is to investigate whether an area-level measure of racial sentiment derived from Twitter data is associated with state-level hate crimes and existing measures of racial prejudice at the individual-level. Methods: We collected 30,977,757 tweets from June 2015–July 2018 containing at least one keyword pertaining to specific groups (Asians, Arabs, Blacks, Latinos, Whites). We characterized sentiment of each tweet (negative vs all other) and averaged at the state-level.