Has Gen-Y transcended race?

Race: the final frontier. Or is it? The popular conception is that for us Millenials (Americans born between 1982 and 2003), racial divisions are but a thing of the past, a vestige of an era that belonged to our parents and grandparents.

Unquestionably the advances in race relations from the civil rights movement and the gradual but significant steps toward racial tolerance that followed have shaped a context for Gen-Y that is considerably more racially and ideologically diverse. But the currents of bias and division that fueled the conundrums of the past have truthfully only cloaked themselves in subtler, more nuanced garbs, and as such, require a far warier and sophisticated frame of mind to navigate them successfully.

I once had a history teacher who expressed nostalgia for the days of the Cold War, if for no other reason, he argued, than for the fact that he was wholly confident that the Americans were good guys at that point, and that the Soviets were clearly and invariably villainous. Since then, he said, international conflicts have been decidedly less black and white, and which side to pick in a given scenario is much harder to figure.

Though the man in question was a baby boomer, his analysis struck me, ironically, as fitting for Generation Y's relationship with race. Where our parents may have been comfortably up in arms in the face of rampant but apparent and overt racial discrimination, Gen Y's burden is in many ways compounded by the complexity of mitigating factors like political correctness and cultural miscegenation.

Where our predecessors' obligation to social justice and courses of action were equally urgent and obvious, for those of us coming of age today, the necessity to act is challenged by the fact that our prospective enemies look quite a bit like our friends.

On a separate occasion, the professor of my race and ethnic relations class asked his students to fill out a "social distance scale." The scale was made up of varying ethnic and social groups, and the objective was to list the greatest capacity in which one would be comfortable with members of each group occupying a place in one's life.

As the only student to indicate that all of the listed groups were welcome in any capacity in my life, I was met with derision and disbelief. The class's skepticism, I argued, reflected a drastic oversimplification of the nature of prejudice when one is forced to engage in a multicultural society. By indicating that anyone from any ethnic background had potential to be a friend of mine, I was not actually denying my own prejudices; instead, I was merely asserting that taken at face value, I was open to befriending -- or even potentially marrying -- anyone from any background.

The class's confusion illustrates a greater misconception about Generation Y's perspectives on race. While we may not harbor the same absolute distastes for those who differ from us in the manner that previous generations did, a more evolved, and arguably more insidious kind of prejudice lurks just beneath the surface, governing our interactions and decisions in less transparent ways.

Put another way, while you'd be hard-pressed to catch me using the word "whitey" and rapping about an insurrection in the company of my black friends, I have been known to sneer when a white teenager zooms past me in a vehicle while undulating to the rhythm of the newest Yung Joc banger.

While I may not veto the sexual advances of young white girls outright, the prospect of the ire and disapproval a public date with one will generate from sisters does give me more than a little pause.

While my upbringing has played out like the concluding scene in Hairspray -- albeit with fewer dance numbers and more suburban ennui -- it doesn't seem far-fetched to assume that the racial attitudes of my white, Asian and Latino counterparts are similarly ambivalent. The variation of perspectives on the progress of race relations among members of Gen Y is a testament to this.

The nomination of Barack Obama for president is the most high-profile Rorschach test of the year when it comes to discerning the various perspectives on race today. Progressive oldies love to trumpet the "candidate who transcends race" as indisputable evidence that America is collectively above racial discrimination, but there are many of my generation who interpret Obama's success as particularly telling as well.

Among the coffeehouse-centered collegiate elite, I constantly find myself on the less-represented end of a debate whether Obama is living proof that blackness is no longer a liability but a bonus, or if he is just most savvy politician yet at mobilizing the coalition of blacks and wealthy whites who find the prospect of a black president fashionable.

Born into the racially homogenous milieu of the black poor but educated at an equally homogenous but all white elite private school, my appreciation for disparities between the white and black American experiences developed an edge at age 9 when my family left the St. Louis ghetto for the comparatively posh suburbs of the nation's capital.

With a biography stratified by exposure to both the violence-stricken disrepair of the inner cities and the privileged, multi-cultural suburbs that teemed with educational and economic opportunities, my perspective of the race question is as distinctly Gen Y as it gets. But that's still only one perspective within a multitude that varies with a diversity as great as our ethnic backgrounds.

Spending many years as a token myself, the fact that one of only three black Senators since Reconstruction has secured the presidential nomination, is not to me representative of the culmination of a successful integration but mere tokenism.

Such an opinion is unpopular today, and some might be quick to dismiss this idea, but that would be a mistake. I would like nothing more than to believe that the country has changed as absolutely as those who say it has, and perhaps, if we're lucky, by the heyday of Generation Z, folks like me will be proven decidedly passé.