Reporter’s Notebook: A Look Inside Our Focus Groups on Youth and Race

Research director Dom Apollon explains the project and speaks with some of the focus group participants on camera.

By Channing Kennedy, Dom Apollon Jun 07, 2011

Mainstream news media seems pretty certain that today’s young adults, sometimes referred to as Millennials, don’t see race. They date interracially, they identify as mixed-race, and they voted for Barack Obama; the only possible explanation is that they don’t care what color anyone is, right? The problem, of course, is that nobody’s bothered to test this idea. That’s why Dom Apollon, research director of the Applied Research Center, decided to collect some real data and question the assumption. In this video, Dom discusses the need for the research and the methodology used, and lays out the three major findings about young people’s racial attitudes in the new report. He also interviews participants from the Los Angeles focus groups, asking their opinions on Barack Obama and the United States’ fast-changing demographic profile.