What Millennials think about voting for a Black candidate

(Defender News Service) – Millennials, often thought to be less racist than earlier generations, have reservations about electing Black candidates.

There’s a gender and political divide among millennials when it comes to casting a ballot for qualified non-white candidates, a new BuzzFeed News and Maru/Blue survey found.

One out of three men (36 percent) said they would prefer a white political candidate if all else was equal. Just 11 percent of women survey shared that view. Republicans, at 42 percent, admitted that they would choose a white candidate over an equally qualified nonwhite candidate, as compared to 22 percent of Democrats who agreed with them.

Pollsters surveyed 1,006 millennials, aged 22 to 37, online.

Decades after public school integration and the passage of civil rights legislation, many have wondered whether younger Americans are less racist than older generations.

White millennials are not much different from generation x (born 1965 – 1980) or baby boomers (born 1946 – 1964) when it comes to explicit prejudice against African Americans, according to The Washington Post.

Young whites expressed less prejudice on four out of five measures compared to older generations, but only by one to three percent, the Post’s analysis of data in 2015 found.

A review in January of the University of Chicago’s GenForward Project survey of millennials by CBS News reinforced the Post’s analysis.

One of the troubling findings of GenForward is that nearly half (48 percent) of white millennials believe that discrimination against white people has become as big a problem as discrimination against African Americans.

Perhaps on a brighter side, the BuzzFeed survey showed that a majority of millennials disapproved of President Trump’s job performance. About 68 percent of them don’t like how he talks about Hispanic and Black people. However, that still leaves a sizeable minority who see no problem with the president’s racist attitude.

This article originally published in the November 5, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.