Arthur Wang: Millennials fail to recognize racism as continuing issue

“Lazy” and “entitled” – these inaccuracies have been used over and over by those older than us to characterize the millennial generation, which is currently coming of age and includes the vast majority of today’s college students.

New research released earlier this month by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute seems to suggest an addition to the list – “tolerant,” when it comes to diversity and race. More than 80 percent of the roughly 150,000 first-year students surveyed around the country claimed that they had a strong ability to “see the world from someone else’s perspective” and “work cooperatively with diverse people.”

The result is a mounting assumption of post-raciality, a concept that race and discrimination are no longer serious social problems, which picked up steam after President Barack Obama was elected. The UCLA higher education report and comprehensive polling by MTV strongly suggests that many millennials subscribe to the idea, and white millennials especially so. The idea is attractive because of its emphasis on matters such as individual character rather than more complex sociological factors.

The findings on diversity reflect well on a generation that has to deal with the racial and economic inequality exacerbated by the baby-boom generation, but it should not lead us to rule out more nuanced readings of the future of race relations in the United States. While millennials may be more tolerant, their growing tendency to ignore race may prove to seriously hamper efforts to address inequality and injustice in this country and on this campus.

The UCLA community is no stranger to the consequences of this supposed post-racial thinking. The tussle over the merits of the proposed diversity requirement for the UCLA College, including a Bruin Republicans petition to re-examine the implementation process on the “Free & For Sale” Facebook group, is a recent example.

The “affirmative action bake sale” hosted on campus in 2013, where pastries were sold at different prices to correspond to alleged racial biases in college admissions, is another case. Post-racial beliefs are the root of affirmative action opposition – and young people, it seems, are no fans. In the MTV poll, 88 percent claimed that considering race in college admissions is unfair.

In 2011, Alexandra Wallace became a poster girl for the necessity of diversity at UCLA when she created the “Asians in the Library” video. Her rant gave rise to an uncomfortable question – how many other students on campus claim to not see race but hold the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype against Asian Americans?

Subtle measurements of racial attitudes reveal bleak findings. Using a social psychology assessment called the implicit associations test, which measures unconscious connections between concepts and evaluations – such as an between Asians and foreign places – millennials were found to be no more tolerant than their parents. The troubling thing, though, was that they believed themselves to be more tolerant.

It should be said that subconscious attitudes are harder to change than explicit actions, so young adults do not deserve all the blame for shouldering socially inherited prejudices, like the misconception that Asians are somehow smarter than the rest of the population. UC Irvine sociology professor Jennifer Lee’s research put it simply: “race continues to remain significant in the lives of Americans.”

The naïveté of post-raciality and the presumption of color-blindness has national consequences. Some young people pinned the blame of the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent civil unrest on the black community rather than structural inequalities and racialized power dynamics between white officers and black residents. But the fact that the GDP per capita of black America, $23,000, is less than half of the national average is not because almost 42 million people are lazy.

In August, a nationally representative survey by the Pew Research Center brought this disparity in interpretation to the fore: 80 percent of black Americans believed the events in Ferguson, Mo. “(raise) important issues about race,” compared to 37 percent of their white counterparts.

Among millennials, 55 percent thought race mattered, the highest of any age group. But this may simply reflect the high level of diversity among the age group – 39 percent non-white – rather than changing attitudes among white Americans.

In November, Ferguson was at the center of an unfortunate consequence of post-racial attitudes when a group of students protesting in Bruin Plate were callously castigated and booed out of the dining hall by fellow students for interrupting their dinners and calling attention to the fact that the grand jury non-indictment is suggestive of a racially skewed criminal justice system. Perhaps this is why some black students admitted that they didn’t feel comfortable on campus.

As millennials, it might be wise to stop claiming we understand those unlike ourselves. Striving toward a society where race does not matter is an admirable endeavor, but it requires a constant and conscious discussion. It requires an understanding of race – not a deflection of it.