White Millennials are products of a failed lesson in colorblindness

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/white-millennials-products-failed-lesson-colorblindness/#.VRc43m5zC18.facebook

What 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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That anxiety results in deeply misguided ideas about what a future of racial equality would look like. It also produces statistics such as these, summed up by Sean McElwee for Al Jazeera America: “A 2012 Public Religion Institute poll found that 58 percent of white millennials say discrimination affects whites as much as it affects people of color. Only 39 percent of Hispanic millennials and 24 percent of black millennials agree. Similarly, the MTV poll found that only 39 percent of white millennials believe ‘white people have more opportunities today than racial minority groups.’ By contrast, 65 percent of people of color felt that whites have differential access to jobs and other opportunities. Still, 70 percent of millennials said, ‘it’s never fair to give preferential treatment to one race over another, regardless of historical inequalities.’”

[Warpy]

1. Oh, we knew King was right and white supremacy was the problem.

However, we older Boomers who had been active in Civil Rights were never given access to places where we might have been able to promote POC instead of using Nixon's war on drugs as an excuse to put so many of them in prison.

We were relegated to welcoming the new black faces at work and accepting the people behind them as full equals.

Decades of segregation had made that more difficult than you'd think. Most people did the best they could to erode white privilege in the workplace among the peons, at least.

Millennials don't have the experience of full on segregation, so unless they are promoted into the halls of power (fat chance), they will be hard put to realize just how much white privilege is still intact and that the higher in the food chain you go, the more white privilege there is.

[1StrongBlackMan]

2. posted to for later. n/t

[Starry Messenger]

3. I'm a Gen Xer, so I can't speak to that.

I do agree with the article that our education on race was taught without historical context in a kind of Big Blue Marble, Free to Be You and Me way.

It wasn't until college that I heard of whiteness as a construct, and discussed privilege. There was a lot of resistance to think in those terms.

White Millennials exist in a system of structural racism--there may not be de jure segregation, but if they are going to college or working in tech, they are in an environment that is segregated. If they aren't aware of that, that's a problem.

[starroute]

4. I agree -- the Boomers, or at least the engaged ones, knew the truth

It started being glossed over in the early 70s, around the time of that Coke commercial where a multi-ethnic bunch of Coke drinkers was standing on a hillside and warbling, "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony."

That wasn't our doing -- it was the generation before ours writing the ad copy. But it became the official version of history.

When my (Millennial) son was in high school, I tried to tell him that racism was still a problem, and the answer I got was, "That can't be true because none of my friends are racists." Even when he went to college and had a Hispanic friend who complained about racism, he thought the guy was being over-sensitive. But in the dozen or so years since, he's finally gotten the message.

It's true that the Millennials were raised with the wrong idea -- but that was true on a lot of fronts. It was no different from the way they were taught that the way to save the planet is by recycling and turning out the lights when you leave the room. Or that if people are poor, it means they're not trying hard enough. Everything was laid on the individual, and that generation still needs to learn the power of the collective.