Dylann Roof And The Stubborn Myth Of The Colorblind Millennial

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/20/415878789/dylann-roof-and-the-stubborn-myth-of-the-colorblind-millennial

More tellingly, it turns out that even as this generation is on the whole "cool" with interracial marriage and dating, there's a lot of daylight between the way white millennials and those of color feel about a bunch of other questions about race. In that aforementioned MTV survey, young white people were nearly twice as likely to say that the government pays too much attention to the problems of racial minority groups. They were also nearly twice as likely to say that discrimination against white people has become as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

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Despite all of this, we still hold out hope that the kids are all right. It's a hope that seems fueled by the idea that America's coming non-white majority and rising levels of intermarriage augur some harmonious beige future. But even that premise is shaky. A big Pew study on multiracial Americans released in June found that most of the country's multiracial adults are likely to identify with one race — usually a non-white one — often because of their own experiences with race-based discrimination.

The idea that all that we're going to, um, cross-pollinate our way out of entrenched racist beliefs and race-driven life outcomes is worse than just a form of magical thinking. It's a way of handing down debt. It requires a tremendous amount of political and social heavy lifting to topple the pillars of structural racism, but instead of rolling up our sleeves, we've decided to leave the work of doing so to to our kids, anointing them as some sort of magical post-racial elves in the process.

In the interim, we'll scratch our heads and wonder just where Roof's parents were and just how he got so twisted at such a young age. But then we'll comfort ourselves that Roof is a freakish holdover, an outlier out of his time, and that the real millennials are still out there building a better world, "being diverse and promoting equality and everything." But it turns out neither Roof nor the rest of his generational cohort are as untethered from history as we fervently want to believe.