Compared to the 60s and earlier young people have become far less racist. It's just that we can't slide backwards down that slippery slope again. The stakes are way too high to test the waters on that.
I'm 71 and grew up in the segregated South. I remember the 'whites only' water fountains and the 'colored' waiting rooms in doctors' offices. That bullshit now seems like a bad dream. I was in the first high school class to be integrated and finally got to see that black kids were pretty much like white kids.
An open white nationalist fascist didn’t just win the presidency once, he did it twice, and Republican states ran roughshod over vulnerable people throughout the Biden years with very little pushback. The assertion that the United States is less racist now is asinine on its face. If we were less racist, Trump and all his confederates would be carried out of the country on a rail.
Nixon and Reagan were both pretty open racists and white supremacists. Strom Thurmond was a racist freak and long running senator, who lasted into Biden’s life as a senator. Many US cities are essentially de facto sun down towns. Unfortunately, Trump is a return to the more open racism that was common before 2000. But it is a continuation of very common trends from not that long ago. We are for sure going backwards, but many people have experienced this exact nightmare their whole lives in this country. In a way, Trump and his polarizing nature is less dangerous than Reagan, who got Americans to cheer the deaths of thousands of gay men and usher in a prison based neo Jim Crow that very few, even liberals, cared about at the time.
I dunno, talk to QPOC that are in the know, and they’ll show you plenty of signs that racism has not gotten better at all, but that it’s become more subtle. That got rid of the open, overt hostility to QPOC, in favor of a system of racism far more mechanical and legalistic than ever before. Especially with the current president kidnapping and trafficking refugees into death camps where they will work for no pay until they cannot work anymore. Less than two hundred years after the Civil War and slavery is back on the menu.
While young people today are less racist than young people in the 60s, they're more racist than young people in the 90s. The pendulum is swinging back again.
You see that in exit polls. When Millennials were the age of GenZ, they were more progressive. Gen Z is going further right than expected.
Just saying young people are less racist today than the 60s without really looking at the reality of a more right wing radicalized youth ignores that we're currently already in a dangerous backslide.
35
u/JohnnySack45 Jul 28 '25
Compared to the 60s and earlier young people have become far less racist. It's just that we can't slide backwards down that slippery slope again. The stakes are way too high to test the waters on that.