One oft-employed generalization about The Kids These Days is that they’ve grown up free from the legalized discrimination and racial neuroses of older generations, and they will live in a more multicultural world with less racism. But do we even know if that’s true?
MTV, that reliable weather vane of popular youth culture, wanted to find out. It polled a nationally representative sample of people ages 14 to 24 about their views on bias and identity.
“The first thing we wanted to just find out was how much our audience knew about bias, talked about bias and cared about bias,” Luke Hales, the lead researcher on the survey, said. The poll was conducted ahead of MTV’s Look Different project, which is meant to help young people deal with bias and discrimination in their daily lives.
Equality Is Good …
What the pollsters found is that many values are shared across all racial groups, like a strong sense of the importance of equality. But they also found that the respondents seemed to lack historical perspective, which might not be too surprising because of their ages. Another reason they may not have much historical perspective? Race isn’t something they talk about very much.
Here’s what they agreed on, across all races. Respondents believed people should be treated the same, regardless of race, and they felt people their age believed in equality more than older people. Most felt President Barack Obama’s election was proof that racism was mostly a phenomenon of the past and that race was not a barrier to accomplishment.
Eight in 10 said they knew someone who was biased; 6 in 10 felt that they were not personally biased. More than half said that bias was a serious problem but that it was mostly hidden, and a solid majority said they’d worked to get rid of their own biases.
The pollsters found that respondents wanted a colorblind society and believed that “never considering race would improve society” — while at the same time they also said “embracing diversity and celebrating differences would make society better.”
Kids today! They just can’t seem to make up their minds.
… But Affirmative Action? Not So Much.
Significant majorities of both young whites (74 percent) and people of color (65 percent) said they were opposed to preferential treatment being given to one race over another, regardless of historical inequalities.
Relatedly, majorities of people of color and white people felt that people of color use racism as an excuse more than they should.
Read the full story at npr.org
