Young and post-racial -

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NEW YORK — The most racially diverse generation in American history works hard to see race as just another attribute, no more important than the cut of a friend's clothes or the music she likes.

But the real world keeps intruding, as it has the past few weeks with angry protests over the racially charged deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in nearby Staten Island, N.Y.

"As a generation, we don't acknowledge color, but we know that the race problem is still there," says 16-year-old Nailah Richards, an African-American student at Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Brooklyn. "We don't really pay attention to it, but we know it's there."

Nailah is one of the Millennials, the 87 million Americans born between 1982 and 2001. They are defined by opinion surveys as racially open-minded and struggling to be "post-racial."

Pew Research says Millennials are the most racially tolerant of any recent generation — only 5%, for instance, say interracial marriages are "a bad thing for society" vs. 14% of Baby Boomers. And 93% of Millennials believe it's OK for African-American and white people to interracially date, 10 percentage points higher than Boomers, a 2010 survey shows.

CLOSE USA TODAY asked teens at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. about diversity and how it affects their lives and generation.

"We don't really care if you're purple, brown, black — it doesn't even matter," Nailah says. "If you're a person, you are who you are."

But as they witness recent protests, and as their generation matures, Millennials are recognizing just how much race still matters to society, to their friends and family, and to themselves.

"I feel like if you don't acknowledge it, then it's like, 'Are you blind?' I feel like it has to be acknowledged," says Domonique Antoine, 16, one of Nailah's classmates. "It's something that has to be acknowledged because there's a certain level of privilege that African-American and Latino people — brown people — don't have."

"I don't think (racism) ever left," says Izabelle Denize, 22. "I think with every decade it transforms into something really different. For our generation you have these criminal justice issues. Before, in the '50s you had Jim Crow. ... I think every generation, it does look a little different."

Business consultant Howard Ross, author of the 2014 book Everyday Bias, says Millennials are likely as surprised by the recent racially charged events as anyone. "This is a generation of people who are now saying, 'Wait a second, we thought this was over. We were told this was over. We thought we were moving forward and now we see the same old stuff happening.'"

Millennials score 62 on the USA TODAY Diversity Index, a scale from 0 to 100 that measures the chance that two random people will be from a different race or ethnicity. By comparison, Boomers score 45 and their parents, the so-called Silent Generation, score just 36.

High school student Nailah Richards from the Sadie Nash Leadership Project.

(Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY)

USA TODAY spoke with Nailah, Domonique and a handful of her classmates and friends last week as they took a break from an after-school class at the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, a non-profit education initiative near Manhattan's Grand Central Station that attracts young women from all five city boroughs.

Most are non-white, and several are the first in their family born in the USA.

"I do wonder if the skin color that I am is going to determine my future and what I'm going to do," says Esther Agyei, 16.

Born in Ghana, she still has close family there. Esther lives in the Bronx with her mother. Teachers at Esther's school regularly tell her and her classmates that they can "be anything you want to be," but she isn't so sure that all of the adults in her life actually believe that. "I think they're lying — I mean, of course in school they're pushing you to do your dream, whatever you want to do. But I think (in) reality, that's not true. You go outside, I know that's not true."

Where skin color matters -

Many young people still see the USA's intractable problems as rooted in race. In a May 2012 report, Race Forward: the Center for Racial Justice Innovation found that "a large majority" of young people in the Los Angeles area believed race and racism still mattered significantly — particularly as they relate to education, criminal justice and employment. In follow-up sessions in five cities in early 2012, the center found that "racial justice" was the most significant interest among young people.

"Do I feel like I live in a post-racial society?" asks Izabelle. "Not at all. Not at all."

Izabelle Denize, 22, from the Sadie Nash Leadership Project at the school facility in Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 4.

(Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY)

A recent Rutgers University graduate, Izabelle now serves on the Sadie Nash board and mentors younger students. She grew up in and around Newark, but her parents grew up in Haiti, where skin color matters perhaps even more than it does in New Jersey. "Racism in Haiti looks a little different from racism in the United States," she says. "Having both of those perspectives tells me that being black changes, but you still are 'The Other' in every context."

In his book, Ross notes that humans are "consistently, routinely, and profoundly biased." The sooner we realize this and stop denying that bias plays out in our lives every day, he writes, the better off we'll be. Actually, he notes, psychologists have a term for our deep-seated preference to be around people who look and think and sound like us: homophily.

"We're drawn towards each other because our mirroring capacity, the part of our brain that wants to understand what we're dealing with, feels very comfortable with people like ourselves, because we kind of know what to expect," Ross says. "They're speaking our language, they're acting like we act, they're talking like we talk, they have the same concerns that we have. And so as a result, we're drawn to people like that. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but what's troubling is when that's the only connection we have."

Following friends online -

Researcher danah boyd, whose recent book, It's Complicated, examines how teens socialize online, notes that "the world in which teens live is segregated and shaped by race." Though teens do work to maintain cross-racial friendships, they're more likely to interact with people of the same race in class, in the lunchroom and online.

For five years, boyd, (who refers to herself in print in the lower case) interviewed teens in 17 states and analyzed 10,000 social network profiles. She found that schools are rarely if ever explicitly segregated by race, but that the segregation happens in a kind of quiet, de facto way, both through class assignment and social pressures. boyd found that race was still a sensitive issue among teens, and that they prefer not to talk about it, but that they still strongly identify each other racially.

Author danah boyd

(Photo: Yale University Press)

Sixty years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education case that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. But boyd found that most U.S. high schools "organized themselves around race and class through a variety of social, cultural, economic, and political forces." The borders of school districts often produce segregated schools as a byproduct of neighborhood segregation, and students are placed in classrooms and on academic tracks based on test scores that often correlate with socioeconomic status.

She also found that the early shift in social networking sites from MySpace to Facebook, primarily among white, upper-middle-class teens in 2006 and 2007, constituted a kind of "white flight" that mirrored suburban whites' move out of cities. MySpace was the subject of many "moral panic" stories in the media around that time, such as the "MySpace suicide" story in 2007 in Missouri. She found that kids were listening to their parents' fears: Facebook represented a clean, well-lit refuge from racial diversity. Social networking sites, she found, were basically the digital equivalent of the school cafeteria, reflecting kids' comfort — or discomfort — with kids of different racial and ethnic groups.

Schoolchildren visit the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

(Photo: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)

Social divisions, including racial divisions, "are not disappearing simply because people have access to technology," boyd says. "Tools that enable communication do not sweep away distrust, hatred and prejudice." The mere existence of new technology "neither creates nor magically solves cultural problems. In fact, their construction typically reinforces existing social divisions."

For instance, when she sat down to look at the Facebook profile of a white 17-year-old girl at a private East Coast high school, boyd found that though her school recruited students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, most of those who had left comments on the student's profile were white. "Teens go online to hang out with their friends," she wrote, "and given the segregation of American society, their friends are quite likely to be of the same race, class, and cultural background."

When boyd visited one Los Angeles high school, she recalled, "I was initially delighted by how diverse and integrated the school appeared to be." But she found that during lunch and between classes, "the school's diversity dissolved as peers clustered along racial and ethnic lines."

That tracks closely with how their parents' generation experienced race, says Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of the sociology of education at Columbia University's Teachers College. Wells was the lead author of a large study of the USA's graduating high school class of 1980, who recounted their experiences in racially diverse schools. She found "a silent majority" of 40-somethings who said it made them more tolerant of other races.

Like boyd, Wells found that the students' closest friends tended to be of the same race, but she still says that consciously bringing together students of different races was useful. "If we think about desegregation as supposedly changing hearts and minds, I think it actually did that."

In many cases, her interview subjects were surprised, decades later, that institutions such as housing and employment didn't follow in the schools' footsteps. "They all said, 'We thought we were being educated for a different world. But the world didn't change — only our schools changed.' To me it's a big story about why the schools can't do it alone."

Wells, whose work has placed her across the interview table from thousands of parents, now says none of them has illusions about the importance of raising kids in a diverse society. "They know intuitively that putting your kid in a segregated school is not good preparation for the 21st century."

The century — and the changes it promises — are only beginning. Recent Census data show that 43% of newborns today are non-white, and that by 2043, the USA population will be majority non-white.

"It's our demographic destiny," Wells says. "At some point we have to realize that."