Answer Hate Speech With Education
Frat boys caught on video singing a racist chant are shocking but not as surprising as we might think. New studies show young folks to be no less prejudiced than their elders. They just believe they are.
And so do we, their elders.
That belief stems largely and ironically from our reluctance in today's polite society to talk about race candidly across racial lines. That's reason enough to use these eruptions of so-called political correctness as opportunities not only to castigate but also to educate.
The University of Oklahoma stirred a national reconsideration of youth attitudes after startling video surfaced. It shows members of the campus's Sigma Alpha Epsilon singing a racist chant from the days of legal segregation: "There will never be a n----- at SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me...."
University and national fraternity reflexes respond quickly to such dust-ups.
The national fraternity immediately suspended the chapter; the university's president expelled two students involved and emptied the chapter's house of inhabitants.
Many of us are shocked and dismayed by this video in light of our widespread happier perceptions of today's rising millennial generation. These, after all, are kids of a supposedly post-racial or colorblind generation that certainly displays more tolerant behaviors and attitudes than their elders.
A 2010 Pew Research Center report for example, found declared millennials to be more likely to support interracial marriage and dating and to be generally more accepting of immigrants and other minorities.
However a closer look taken by analysts such as Spencer Piston, a professor at the Campbell Institute at Syracuse University, found that such studies were distorted by failing to take into account the inclusion of more people of color in the sampling pool.
Viewed by themselves, Piston found "White millennials appear to be no less prejudiced than the rest of the white population," on questions such as rating various groups for intelligence and how hard working they are.
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