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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCharleston, Dylann Roof and the racism of millennials
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/06/18/charleston-racism-and-the-myth-of-tolerant-millennials/Roof, who was born in 1994, violently shatters one particularly entrenched myth that society holds about racism that todays millennials are more tolerant than their parents, and that racism will magically die out as previous generations pass on. We think that millennials should be lauded for aspiring to be colorblind. There is the belief that tolerant young people will intermarry and create a post-racial, brown society and that it will be beautiful.
But the truth is that the kids are not all right when it comes to racial equality. Studies have shown that millennials are just about as racist as previous generations:
(snip)
As Jamelle Bouie at Slate noted:
Millennials have grown up in a world where we talk about race without racism or dont talk about it at all and where skin color is the explanation for racial inequality, as if ghettos are ghettos because they are black, and not because they were created. As such, their views on racism where you fight bias by denying it matters to outcomes are muddled and confused.
Which gets to the irony of this survey: A generation that hates racism but chooses colorblindness is a generation that, through its neglect, comes to perpetuate it.
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)aren't we?
gollygee
(22,336 posts)or everyone of every other generation. The article says that millenials are about the same as other generations, not worse.
marmar
(77,942 posts)..... the problem is that they're also probably more likely to believe that racial equality exists, so they aren't as likely to recognize the problems.
gollygee
(22,336 posts)on the surface it might seem better because of the "colorblind" thing, but when people study and ask questions about beliefs, it's about the same.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)What this "shatters" is any notion that the killer was a decent human being. That's it.
It says nothing about whether millennials are more or less racist than preceding generations. WTF, even I am annoyed by millennials at times but no way am I going to make some kind of grand proclamation based on this horrible incident.
gollygee
(22,336 posts)Look at the answers to the questions that were asked.
SidDithers
(44,228 posts)one data point - that Dylann Roof is a racist piece of shit - doesn't shatter the "entrenched myth".
Acknowledging that, as a society, millennials are more tolerant, is not the same as saying that ALL millennials are tolerant.
Sid
gollygee
(22,336 posts)as referenced in the article (and there's more specific info if you click the link.) Their generation is about the same as other generations. Your personal feelings about it are not more authoritative than studies done by professionals.
yardwork
(63,683 posts)gollygee
(22,336 posts)maybe you want to post the data you've seen as well.
gollygee
(22,336 posts)News about race in America these days is almost universally negative. Longstanding wealth, income and employment gaps between whites and people of color are increasing, and tensions between police and minority communities around the country are on the rise. But many claim theres a glimmer of hope: The next generation of Americans, they say, is post-racialmore tolerant, and therefore more capable of easing these race-based inequities. Unfortunately, closer examination of the data suggests that millennials arent racially tolerant, theyre racially apathetic: They simply ignore structural racism rather than try to fix it.
In 2010, a Pew Research report trumpeted that the younger generation is more racially tolerant than their elders. In the Chicago Tribune, Ted Gregory seized on this to declare millennials the most tolerant generation in history. These types of arguments typically cling to the fact that young people are more likely than their elders to favor interracial marriage. But while millennials are indeed less likely than baby boomers to say that more people of different races marrying each other is a change for the worse (6 percent compared to 14 percent), their opinions on that score are basically no different than those of the generation immediately before them, the Gen Xers, who come in at 5 percent. On interracial dating, the trend is similar, with 92 percent of Gen Xers saying its all right for blacks and whites to date each other, compared to 93 percent of millennials.
Furthermore, these questions dont really say anything about racial justice: After all, interracial dating and marriage are unlikely to solve deep disparities in criminal justice, wealth, upward mobility, poverty and educationat least not in this century. (Black-white marriages currently make up just 2.2 percent of all marriages.) And when it comes to opinions on more structural issues, such as the role of government in solving social and economic inequality and the need for continued progress, millennials start to split along racial lines. When people are asked, for example, How much needs to be done in order to achieve Martin Luther Kings dream of racial equality? the gap between white millennials and millennials of color (all those who dont identify as white) are wide. And once again, millennials are shown to be no more progressive than older generations: Among millennials, 42 percent of whites answer that a lot must be done to achieve racial equality, compared to 41 percent of white Gen Xers and 44 percent of white boomers.
(snip)
In a 2009 study using American National Election Studiesa survey of Americans before and after each presidential electionVincent Hutchings finds, younger cohorts of Whites are no more racially liberal in 2008 than they were in 1988. My own analysis of the most recent data reveals a similar pattern: Gaps between young whites and old whites on support for programs that aim to further racial equality are very small compared to the gaps between young whites and young blacks.
B2G
(9,766 posts)It doesn't speak to the views they hold about other races.
gollygee
(22,336 posts)for instance it talks about how feelings about interracial marriage and dating are about the same between millennial and gen xers.
And this is in the first article I posted as well:
When it comes to explicit prejudice against blacks, non-Hispanic white millennial are not much different than whites belonging to Generation X (born 1965-1980) or Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964). White millennial (using a definition of being born after 1980) express the least prejudice on 4 out of 5 measures in the survey, but only by a matter of 1 to 3 percentage points, not a meaningful difference. On work ethic, 31 percent of millennial rate blacks as lazier than whites, compared to 32 percent of Generation X whites and 35 percent of Baby Boomers.
You can see the answers to other questions here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/07/white-millennials-are-just-about-as-racist-as-their-parents/
But it's also about structural racism, which is about "what we need to do," which requires you to see it as a problem. Part of structural racism is not recognizing that we have a lot of work to do in this country.
yardwork
(63,683 posts)Brickbat
(19,339 posts)I think that's the point. By pushing the "color blind" myth, those of us in earlier generations have let them down. We should have been talking about racism all along instead of hoping they just wouldn't see race.
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)as a general rule.
notadmblnd
(23,720 posts)has gone further to fan the flames in the reprisal of racial intolerance. With the election of Obama and the disrespect he has received from those on the right- they have sent the signal that it is okay to once again drag ones bigoted thoughts, feelings, words and actions out into the open.
gollygee
(22,336 posts)bullwinkle428
(20,640 posts)certainly won't happen within the lifetime of anyone posting on this board as of today.
LittleBlue
(10,362 posts)represents Muslims or the Beltway Snipers represented black Americans.
gollygee
(22,336 posts)It does not claim he represents all millennials.
marions ghost
(19,841 posts)---