Chapter Three Activity #4 Online Article

Link to original article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/turns-out-white-millennials-are-just-as-conservative-as-their-parents_n_5ce856fee4b0512156f16939 

Turns Out White Millennials Are Just As Conservative As Their Parents

Background Information: 

The generation born between 1981 and 1996 is 40 percent people of color. More than three-quarters of millennials say immigrants strengthen the country, the majority believe humans are causing climate change and only 29 percent approve of Donald Trump's performance as president. Millennials led many of the most prominent cultural and political movement of the last decade like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the "Dreamer" protests and the efforts to address campus sexual assault. But despite being the most diverse and well-educated cohort of voters in U.S. history, the millennial generation also contains many of the country’s oldest and most persistent fault lines. In both social attitudes and voting behavior, white millennials look more like their parents and grandparents than their peers.

Relation to Politics:

Donald Trump won white voters between 18 and 29 in the 2016 election by a margin of 5 percentage points. While that age group includes both millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z, it is hardly an anomaly. Barack Obama is the only Democratic candidate to win young white voters in the last 15 years- and even then, 58 percent of white millennials said they disapproved of his job performance by the time he left office.

The Social Aspect(s): 

Though younger whites are more liberal than their parents on climate change and same-sex marriage, they are strikingly similar on gun control and universal health care. In a 2016 survey, 46 percent of white millennials said discrimination against whites was just as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. Though their attitudes are becoming more liberal over time, white millennials’ political preferences are generally closer to those of older whites than they are to those of non-white millennials. “People who think the future is bright for Democrats shouldn’t get too comfortable with that thought.”

Why This is Happening:

The reasons for the ideological gap between white millennials and millennials of color are complex. The most common explanation for social change over time is known as “contact theory.” According to this explanation, whites who interact more frequently with people of color will be more tolerant and less threatened by demographic change. Given the greater diversity of the millennial generation and Americans’ increasingly liberal attitudes toward interracial relationships, political commentators and academics have generally expected younger whites to have more moderate racial attitudes than their parents and grandparents. This theory, however, rests on the assumption that whites are having meaningful relationships with minorities. Ryan Enos, a Harvard professor who studies racial attitudes, pointed out that public schools are no less segregated now than they were in the 1960s. Even when white students do attend diverse schools, they are more likely to be sequestered into monogrammatic “gifted and talented” programs. Though interracial relationships are indeed on the rise, they appear to be mostly between African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans.

“Even as we see more diversity on TV and in workplaces and schools, America is still a wildly segregated society,” Enos said. “White people are growing up in environments that are overwhelmingly white.” In a 2018 survey, the percentage of younger whites self-reporting that they had interracial friendships was nearly identical to that of older whites.

It's Effect on the Future:

The racial divide among millennials is also on track to intensify as minorities make up more of the population. “When you show people headlines about the changing demographics of the country, they move in a conservative direction,” said Schildkraut. “Young people respond to messages about threats to white dominance in similar ways as previous generations."

The political implications are already upon us. For Republicans, intensifying racial tensions will mean that appeals to whiteness are likely to remain an effective strategy for scoring votes and boosting turnout. In the 2018 midterms, white voters between 18 and 24 were even more conservative than white voters in their late 20s and 30s. Republicans could also find themselves with a larger base of white Americans than the dry demographic statistics suggest. As it has so many times before, the Whiteness Club may simply enroll new members as politicians continue to cast African Americans and immigrants as an existential threat to the country’s future.  

The millennial racial divide also has implications for Democrats. Policies explicitly aimed at assisting communities of color — such as strengthening affirmative action or distributing reparations for slavery — may seem threatening to younger white voters, making them more likely to jump ship to the Republicans.

Times Are Changing:

But there is also cause for hope. Millennials are more likely to register as independents than Gen Xers or Baby Boomers, indicating that they could be more likely to swing from one party to the other. Younger voters’ more progressive attitudes on climate change, marijuana legalization and paid parental leave could also overcome race as the primary drivers of their voting behavior. What’s clear, though, is that the millennial generation’s rise to power is not going to easily or swiftly bend the arc of history toward justice. “We say demography is destiny, but we don’t know where it’s taking us,” Smith said. “We assume that as the country becomes browner we’ll all shift to the left. But what if some people shift all the way to the right?”

Explanation Behind Edits:

This online article was already fairly concise from the beginning however, the few headlines that were already present did not do a very good job of separating each point into different sections. I thought it was a good idea to separate the first section and label it "Background Information." After reading this section it seemed that the author was giving out general information to give readers context of what was being discussed, like when he states that "the generation born between 1981 and 1996 is 40 percent people of color." It also goes on to mention other information involving millennials, like their large involvement in movements such as Occupying Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the "Dreamer" protests.  This paragraph served as the introduction to the article and established the importance of millennials in today's world. 

For the next section, I decided to label it "relation to politics," because even though it is rather short, it highlights a very important statistic about the 2016 election. This paragraph is where you'll find the most information about millennials and their direct association with Politics today. 

After this, I decided to label the next section "the social issue(s)." In this part of the article, the problem with today's millennial population is directly stated and addressed. It's here that a reader can see why the article has the title of "Turns Out White Millennials Are Just As Conservative As Their Parents." I also thought it was a good idea to make sure that the final sentence of this paragraph coincides with the title, essentially acting as an overall thesis statement. 

The title of the next paragraph is pretty self-explanatory; everything in this section serves as the body of the article, and highlights exactly why the viewpoints of many white millennials aren't changing very rapidly. This section discusses how while we as a (younger) society are making steps towards breaking away from the viewpoints of our predecessors by interacting and growing up with those who are culturally different, there is still a large number of white Americans who don't.  

Like the previous paragraph, this title also speaks for itself pretty well. While most all other parts of the article talk about past events or the current state of millennials today, everything in this section talks about how the future of our society could be. This section of the article goes on to reference how the millennial vote has implications for the future as well as how race relations could change between minorities and whites. 

Lastly, I decided to label final paragraph "there is good news" in reference to the fact that not all hope for the future is lost. While much of the article referenced how the many white millennials in America aren't changing as quickly as many people think, this section does state that change is occurring; even if it isn't quickly. The author also states that more people in the younger population are still more progressive than baby boomers or Gen Xers on certain issues, and are more likely to identify as independent over Democrat or Republican.