However, the article appears to want to argue that racism isn't the issue - it's just a desire to respect tradition. Several kids are interviewed. Typical quote:
“It’s awkward,” acknowledges JonPaul Edge, a senior who is white. “I have as many black friends as I do white friends. We do everything else together. We hang out. We play sports together. We go to class together. I don’t think anybody at our school is racist.”The impression the author leaves us with is that none of the kids are in any way racist - the tradition is enforced by their domineering parents. None of the parents are interviewed.
We could draw from this that younger generations are more tolerant, less racist, etc. Before we get caught up, however, in our excitement at the coming tolerant utopia when today's youth are in power - a few cautionary notes.
Firstly, surely there is a bit of a Bradley effect. Small-town people, especially adolescents, when interviewed by an author for the New York Times, are going to want to seem more tolerant than they are.
But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, why are their parents apparently so racist? The majority of them would have been very young through the US Civil Rights movement, if they were even born(assuming they're about 40-50 years old). Institutionalised racism has essentially been abolished their whole lives! The obvious answer is that institutionalised racism is just a symptom of a culture of racism - which doesn't get abolished quite so quickly. But if their parents managed to learn to be racist from their parents, we should be sceptical that the current generation is somehow going to grow up racism-free.