Report Roll: Don't Call Them 'Post-Racial'

The Applied Research Center (ARC) released a report earlier this month entitled, "Don't Call Them 'Post-Racial': Millennials’ Attitudes on Race, Racism, and Key Systems in Our Society." The report finds three key things regarding race and the rising generation in Los Angeles, including:

1. A large majority of millennials assert that race continues to matter.
2. Millennials are not monolithic.
3. Like most Americans, the majority of young people have difficulty defining present-day racism when initially asked and typically fall back upon generic terms of interpersonal racism.

For more on the report, see below for insights from Dom Apollon, Research Director at ARC, and download the executive summary or full report online.

Mainstream news media seems pretty certain that today’s young adults, sometimes referred to as Millennials, don’t see race. They date interracially, they identify as mixed-race, and they voted for Barack Obama; the only possible explanation is that they don’t care what color anyone is, right?

The problem, of course, is that nobody’s bothered to test this idea. That’s why Dom Apollon, research director of the Applied Research Center, decided to collect some real data and question the assumption. In this video, Dom discusses the need for the research and the methodology used, and lays out the three major findings about young people’s racial attitudes in the new report. He also interviews participants from the Los Angeles focus groups, asking their opinions on Barack Obama and the United States’ fast-changing demographic profile.