White Millenials are products of a failed lesson in colorblindness
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/white-millennials-products-failed-lesson-colorblindnessWhat I’d like to believe from my observations in the streets of Ferguson and New York City at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests is that, among young white people, there is a real awakening around issues of racial justice. Indeed, the number of white people who have shown up, marched, carried signs, and chanted along with calls for an end to institutionalized racism often surprised me. At a time when optimism was difficult to come by, their presence carried the potential of inspiring hope of a coming revolution. But as a frequent participant and observer of conversations that deal with the quest for racial justice, I know better than to place too much hope in these optics.
For one, movements toward racial justice have always attracted a sliver of the young white population with a disposition geared toward radical politics. They are not necessarily representative of their entire generation. Furthermore, with respect to this particular generation, the Millennials, the education these young white people have received have left them ill-equipped to understand the nature of racism and subsequently supplied them analysis that won’t address the problem. As children of the multi-cultural 1980s and 90s, Millennials are fluent in colorblindness and diversity, while remaining illiterate in the language of anti-racism. This may not be the end of the world, if weren’t for the fact that Millennials don’t know the difference between the two.
To be fair, that’s not entirely their fault. They were taught by their elders, Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, about how to think about race and racism. The lessons Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers gleaned from the Civil Rights era is that racism is matter of personal bigotry — racists hate people because of the color of their skin, or because they believe stereotypes about groups of people they’ve never met — not one of institutional discrimination and exploitation. The history Millennials have been taught is through that lens, with a specific focus on misunderstanding the message of Martin Luther King, Jr. Certainly, a world where we all loved one another would be ideal, where each person is seen as equal, where “the dream” of children of all different racial backgrounds holding hands with one another without prejudice is a reality. But Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers generally decided to ignore King’s diagnosis of the problem — white supremacy — and opted to make him a poster-child for a colorblind society, in which we simply ignore construct of race altogether and pray that it will disappear on its own.
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on issues like LGBT marriage equality.
The Sandpiper Village, 5 pm dinnertime crowd should stop to consider that, while exercising their "get off my lawn" muscles.
The thing is, it eventually will. Millennials, Boomers, and X'ers who genuinely embrace the concept of a colorblind society aren't contributing to the problem of white supremacy. While you could make the argument that they aren't activists fighting against it, they also happen to be the group least likely to actively discriminate against someone of another race. The problem, genuinely, sprouts from old people who refuse to let go of their biases.
The good news is that those people will eventually die off, and the world will be a better place without them. We could, theoretically, help that solution along, but most sane people have moral and ethical objections to that sort of thing 
The social constructs of race must be destroyed. The artificial walls that separate us will always be leveraged by those looking for power. We can only remove that leverage by destroying those walls. In the short term, colorblindness does indeed cause some problems for the people working to end racial discrimination. In the long term, it's the only solution that actually fixes the problem of discrimination permanently. The solution, therefore, isn't to get rid of colorblindness, but to make sure that it's not the only answer on the table.
