Last week, the United States was given a harrowing reminder of her dark past and her troubling present. A man by the name of Dylann Roof committed an act of terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina against nine African Americans in the historic Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church on the anniversary of a failed slave revolt by Denmark Vesey after seven months of planning. This man is 21, driven by a white supremacist ideology, and part of a generation we often state is less racist and prejudiced than prior generations. So, how does a millennial become so radicalized in a color blind post-racial society?
One explanation is that our society is neither color blind nor post-racial and that the myth of a color blind post-racial society has allowed millennials to avoid directly addressing their prejudices. Some social scientist posit that millennials actually harbor just as many racial stereotypes as their parents, and that America’s history of structural and institutionalized racism combined with a mythos of color blind post-racism will only sow the seeds for a system where we have racism without racist. When we examine millennial ideology, we find the same race based divides on issues like criminal justice reform, affirmative action, so-called “reverse racism,” and police misconduct of previous generations. Furthermore, although millennials are said to be the most educated generation, they also happen to be the generation that gets much of their information from social media. It is no wonder Dylann was so easily radicalized when he searched for the phrase “black on white crime” and came upon the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where the implicit biases he developed growing up in the United States were given fertile ground to grow and bloom into full blown racism.
Perhaps millennials are not so far flung from the Jim Crow era that they would so readily discard the vestiges of racism, both structural and institutionalized. By telling this generation that color does not matter and that racism is over, we have given them a blank check to ignore the prejudices they may develop over their lifetime through media. When one grows up exposed to a media culture that attributes crime committed by people of color to a character flaw within people of color, it is hard not to develop biases. When one is bombarded by nightly news that disportionately reports black crime, it would be hard to not unwittingly buy into the narrative being pushed. Dylann states in his manifesto that what led to his “awakening” was the Trayvon Martin case, that while watching the news it was readily apparent that Zimmerman was right and that Trayvon was wrong. It would be wholly disingenuous to say the media reporting of the Trayvon Martin case was not biased. There wasn’t a moment during that case that Trayvon was not portrayed as a “thug” or “hooligan” or “troublemaker” by mainstream televised media.
Millennials like Dylann, no matter how far removed from America’s days of overt racism, are just as susceptible to succumbing to the influence of a toxic ideology like white supremacism, and if we never have an honest discussion about systemic and institutionalized racism more millennials are liable to go the way of Dylann and that would have devastating consequences for race relations in America. Until we talk about race we won’t mature as a country. We’ll continue to lose lives to far right ideologues, both ideologically and literally. It’s gonna be hard y’all, but it needs to be done.
State Senate District 5 Gwinnett
Institutionalized, Racism among Millennials
June 26, 2015 — 5th District Blog Posts and CommentsLast week, the United States was given a harrowing reminder of her dark past and her troubling present. A man by the name of Dylann Roof committed an act of terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina against nine African Americans in the historic Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church on the anniversary of a failed slave revolt by Denmark Vesey after seven months of planning. This man is 21, driven by a white supremacist ideology, and part of a generation we often state is less racist and prejudiced than prior generations. So, how does a millennial become so radicalized in a color blind post-racial society?
One explanation is that our society is neither color blind nor post-racial and that the myth of a color blind post-racial society has allowed millennials to avoid directly addressing their prejudices. Some social scientist posit that millennials actually harbor just as many racial stereotypes as their parents, and that America’s history of structural and institutionalized racism combined with a mythos of color blind post-racism will only sow the seeds for a system where we have racism without racist. When we examine millennial ideology, we find the same race based divides on issues like criminal justice reform, affirmative action, so-called “reverse racism,” and police misconduct of previous generations. Furthermore, although millennials are said to be the most educated generation, they also happen to be the generation that gets much of their information from social media. It is no wonder Dylann was so easily radicalized when he searched for the phrase “black on white crime” and came upon the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where the implicit biases he developed growing up in the United States were given fertile ground to grow and bloom into full blown racism.
Perhaps millennials are not so far flung from the Jim Crow era that they would so readily discard the vestiges of racism, both structural and institutionalized. By telling this generation that color does not matter and that racism is over, we have given them a blank check to ignore the prejudices they may develop over their lifetime through media. When one grows up exposed to a media culture that attributes crime committed by people of color to a character flaw within people of color, it is hard not to develop biases. When one is bombarded by nightly news that disportionately reports black crime, it would be hard to not unwittingly buy into the narrative being pushed. Dylann states in his manifesto that what led to his “awakening” was the Trayvon Martin case, that while watching the news it was readily apparent that Zimmerman was right and that Trayvon was wrong. It would be wholly disingenuous to say the media reporting of the Trayvon Martin case was not biased. There wasn’t a moment during that case that Trayvon was not portrayed as a “thug” or “hooligan” or “troublemaker” by mainstream televised media.
Millennials like Dylann, no matter how far removed from America’s days of overt racism, are just as susceptible to succumbing to the influence of a toxic ideology like white supremacism, and if we never have an honest discussion about systemic and institutionalized racism more millennials are liable to go the way of Dylann and that would have devastating consequences for race relations in America. Until we talk about race we won’t mature as a country. We’ll continue to lose lives to far right ideologues, both ideologically and literally. It’s gonna be hard y’all, but it needs to be done.