Younger Blacks are less likely to suggest that discrimination explains racial disparities, tending to ascribe them to Blacks’ lack of will to “pull up their bootstraps”

Five decades on from the end of institutionalized segregation in the U.S., racial disparities between blacks and white endure. Despite these persistent inequalities, there has been a shift among Blacks away from believing that these disparities are caused by continuing discrimination and prejudice. In new research, Candis Watts Smith finds that this change in attitudes is has been driven in part by the growing cohort of young blacks who have grown up in an America that eschews institutional racism. She writes that Blacks born after 1976 are more likely to suggest that racial disparities are due to Blacks’ lack of motivation to pull themselves out of poverty, rather than because of structural discrimination.