When audio leaked of Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, telling his girlfriend not to bring black people to his games, the backlash was huge. And rightfully so.

American society has slowly reached the point where, although racism and discrimination still exist, it has mostly become unacceptable online. There are countless examples of media backlash from a racist or distasteful act. For example on April 21, Avril Lavigne released her “Hello Kitty” music video that people considered to be racist to the Japanese culture. The negative reviews were widespread, and it was another case of society not tolerating racism.

The society we live in is clearly less racist and more accepting than times past. But even so, compared to other generations, Gen Y is the most open-minded of them all.

Millennials are more likely than other generations to support social topics such as same-sex marriage, interracial marriage and marijuana legalization, according to a March 7 Pew Research report on social and demographic trends. They also are the most racially diverse generation in the history of the U.S., due to the large wave of immigration of Hispanics and Asians for the past half-century. And, no surprise here, millennials are the most avid users of technology as “digital natives” who didn’t have to adapt to new technology.

The numbers show that millennials are more open-minded in terms of social issues, and that we use technology and social media a lot. Are those two statistics related, or does our generation’s accepting nature stem from a change in parenting?

Let’s say social media and the Internet are the reason for our open minds. The millennial generation is made up of anyone born after 1980. By the time the very first millennials were teenagers, the Internet was just in its beginning stages and “going viral” was an unknown term. However, those born after the mid-1990s grew up seeing the full potential of the Internet. With the possibility of racist or offensive remarks going viral, millennials saw many careers and reputations ruined from their computer screens. That same half of the millennial generation was also exposed to a wider variety of people and ideas because of how social media made the world smaller. But the Pew Research didn’t poll based on who was a teenager when the Internet existed. So let’s look at the other possible reason millennials are so open-minded.

How you’re raised affects the views you have as an adult. It started becoming socially unacceptable to be racist or discriminate against others with the parents of millennials. And by the time Generation Y was born, most parents were raising their kids in a more accepting environment than generations past.

Parents raised millennials to be more open-minded than generations past, but social media and the Internet has augmented that aspect even further. Social media has made discrimination considerably more publicized. If someone says something extremely offensive or distasteful, it will be breaking news.

Whereas in the past, it was easier for discrimination to go unnoticed, our generation will continue to be open-minded because if we’re not, we will not be accepted by society. Which means the next generation will grow up even more open-minded than we are today.

Kate Beckman is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at kebeckma@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @Kate_Beckman.

Published on April 29, 2014 at 1:20 am