From The Chicago Tribune…
Most tolerant but desensitized? Today’s teens present a thorny contradiction
By Ted Gregory, Tribune reporter
Trying to avoid going home early on a Thursday night, Nate Hampton, Dionte Savage and Bernardo Izaguirre wandered down the sidewalk near the Oak Park Public Library after dinner. Three buddies, joking and enjoying the mild night.
Hampton and Savage, both 18, are African-American. Izaguirre, also 18, is Mexican-American. The friendship started when Savage and Izaguirre were in the same freshman gym class. They added Hampton last year when they met him skateboarding in Scoville Park.
As mundane as the start of their friendship was, it also was symbolic, walking proof of a generational shift: Today’s teenagers are the most tolerant generation in history.
That’s right. Despite recent, shocking reports of suicides prompted by anti-gay bullying, this generation of teenagers tolerates the widest assortment of what contemporary life tosses at them. The Pew Research Center, teen marketers, even teens and the people who work with them say it’s true.
“Millennials, A Portrait of Generation Next,” an extensive study of teens and 20-somethings released earlier this year, showed that members of the Millennial Generation, generally born between 1981 and 2000, are “more racially tolerant than their elders.”
More than two decades of Pew Research surveys confirm that assessment.
“In their views about interracial dating, for example, Millennials are the most open to change of any generation,” the report states.
The study goes on to report that nearly 6 in 10 Millennials say immigrants strengthen the country, compared with 43 percent of adults ages 30 and older.
When the generational movement was pointed out to the three teenagers walking along Lake Street in Oak Park, they shrugged and agreed: no biggie.
“In my history class, we talk about how it used to be all the time,” said Savage, a student at Triton Community College in River Grove. “Now, we have multiple ethnicities mixing and working together, and everybody’s cool about it.”
Izaguirre, enrolled at University of Illinois at Chicago, listed the mixed-race couples in their group of friends. A Japanese-American girl dating a Dominican-American boy, a Native American boy seeing a girl who is half African-American and half white.
Hampton noted that racism is fading with time. “People are people,” he said, “regardless of their skin color, religion or culture. We have no reason to be fearful of anybody.”
A few days earlier and 30 miles south, Jordan Pounder, 17, was hanging out at Sweet Annie’s Everyday Treats, a popular bakery in downtown Flossmoor.
“Now, at our age, that’s the big thing,” Pounder said, “being diverse and promoting equality and everything. Back then, it was more like separate cultures. But now, we live together, talk to each other in school. We don’t see many differences since we interact so much.”
Proprietor Anne Aboushousha has lived the difference. A practicing Catholic, she met and married a Muslim man from Egypt in 1994. Her co-workers at the time worried her husband, Mohammed, would force her to move to Egypt.
Today, they have two teenage children and live in Flossmoor. Their daughter, Franne, went to preschool at a Jewish temple and attends Catholic masses, as does Anne Aboushousha.
She said her children “never, ever” have experienced animosity for their mixed heritage.
“Our kids were babies with all the other kids,” Aboushousha said. “They don’t know the difference” and see diversity as the norm. “Until they go out into the real world, they don’t know how lucky they are.”
Read the full story here.
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