“Why Do Millennials Not Understand Racism?”
“Overall, MTV confirms the general view of millennials: Compared with previous generations, they’re more tolerant and diverse and profess a deeper commitment to equality and fairness. At the same time, however, they’re committed to an ideal of colorblindness that leaves them uncomfortable with race, opposed to measures to reduce racial inequality, and a bit confused about what racism is.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/millennials_racism_and_mtv_poll_young_people_are_confused_about_bias_prejudice.html
The findings of this survey are fascinating, and many of them are frustrating. The fact that only about 1/3 of white families and 1/2 of non-white families discuss race particularly jumps out at me. I definitely fall into the 1/2 that didn’t really discuss race, definitely not before ~high school, and I think about why sometimes; it feels like it was lumped with sex as something that wasn’t quite polite or comfortable to address and that only adults were supposed to talk about.
I really think that our parents had a dream for us, that we were going to be raised with the right set of colorblind values and the right set of politically correct tools and we would overcome all the mistakes made in the past. Like, my Mom sometimes tells me that she really didn’t want me to have to have the conversations she would have with her friends in college. Maybe something about the radicalism of the 60s and then the conservatism of the 80s traumatized everyone and they didn’t want their children to experience any of that confusion and anger.
I don’t know. But ultimately, generalizing from my childhood, we as a generation know a lot about avoiding conversations about race and using any term besides ‘race’ or ‘Black’ (in science, it’s “broadening participation” and then, at best, “minority participation”), and those aren’t really useful skills for dealing with reality.
