Charleston, Dylann Roof and the racism of millennials [View all]

[gollygee]

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 today’s 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 don’t 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.