A new poll suggests some millennials still sleeping on racism
ANALYSIS | Are millennials actually that woke?
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Nicole Lewis.
After the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop was acquitted of all charges in June, a mug shot of a young white woman, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, circulated on Facebook. She had been arrested in 1961 for protesting segregation.
In the text accompanying the image, Bri Traquair, 31, who lives in St. Paul, Minn., wrote that almost every white person she knows “has at least thought they would be like Joan” if they had been alive during the civil rights era. But Traquair also noted how easy it is for her as a young white woman in the face of the racial injustices of today to turn off the channel, to disconnect from the issue, and “to just not think about this anymore.”
“My whole point comes down to this,” she writes. “My fellow white people, if you think you would have done something then, but are doing nothing now, then you wouldn’t have done anything then, either. So think about what side of history you want to be on, because now’s the time for doing something.”
To date, the post has garnered 54,000 likes and was shared more than 43,000 times. Traquair seemed to have struck a nerve by highlighting a tendency among her white peers to distance themselves from the racial injustices happening in real time.
Millennials’ thoughts on police brutality still vary across racial and ethnic lines
A recent survey by GenForward looks at what millennials feel about issues affecting our country. The poll found that young people are divided along racial and ethnic lines in their concerns about racism and police brutality. When asked to list the top issues facing the country today, white and Asian American millennials were far less likely than their African American and Latino peers to list racism or police brutality as one of their top three. The poll offered respondents 22 issues to select from; health care ranked highly for all groups, and immigration was the top issue for Latinos.
Millennials are the largest and most diverse generation in U.S. history. A majority of millennials support same-sex marriage, identify as liberal Democrats and view socialism as a means for transforming the nation’s unequal economic system. But the poll shows that, like Americans overall, we are still divided on whether we think racism is a big problem for society.
Researchers for GenForward, a project of the University of Chicago, polled roughly 1,800 millennials ages 18 to 34 in June and July, making sure to include people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. The researchers tried to contextualize why the divide around racism and police brutality exists, suggesting that major events could have primed the survey takers.
But although African American and Latino millennials might have paid more attention to these incidents, it’s hard to imagine that white millennials and Asian Americans missed them. The debate over the Affordable Care Act, video evidence of police brutality and President Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on immigration have all made national headlines. According to a 2016 study by the Media Insight Project, 85 percent of millennials say that staying on top of the news is at least somewhat important to them. With so many of us trying to stay connected, it would be difficult for us to only see stories about health care while missing the ones on police brutality or immigration.
Will millennials ever converge on the issues?
Despite the numbers, there are a few instances that suggest millennials could be coming together on the issues of racism and police brutality. Over the past two years, as more shootings of unarmed black people by police made national headlines, people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds protested in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Additionally, following the Castile shooting, many young Asian Americans took part in writing an open letter to their family members urging them not to tune out police violence against African Americans.
However, at a time when 42 percent of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about race relations, according to Gallup, the notion that millennials aren’t united to take on racism is worrisome. Although there has been progress over the years, we are still dealing with housing segregation, economic inequality and health disparities. These are issues that millennials will have to address as the generations before us pass on the mantel.
