KIDS AND RACE

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But is that gullibility? Or gutsiness? Today's teens have respect for the past, faith in the future--and a distaste for scapegoating that outstrips that of their parents. One of the survey's more notable findings: even though neither black teens nor whites tend to blame racism as a cause of problems facing blacks, they nonetheless support gender- and race-based scholarships in greater numbers than adults.

People don't always level with pollsters; they're notorious in fact for giving answers they believe to be socially acceptable at the expense of revealing their true feelings. But teens are less likely to do that than adults. Sociologist Howard Pinderhughes, author of the new book Race in the Hood: Conflict and Violence Among Urban Youth, says, "Teenagers are a mirror of our souls. They speak plainly about things that adults would like to hide. Political correctness isn't an issue to them. You're more likely to get what they think unfiltered."

Extensive interviews with children, parents, educators, researchers and law-enforcement officials make clear that the new optimism takes place against a backdrop of a number of new challenges, such as the growing presence of hate groups on the Internet, and old ones, such as interracial dating and ethnic turf wars.

A disinclination to blame problems on racism does not mean a reduced sense of racial identity. Psychologist Beverly Tatum, author of the recently published Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, says she often asks her psychology students to complete this sentence: "I am ______." White students tend to answer with personality traits: "I am friendly," "I am shy," etc. Students of color tend to fill in the blank with their ethnicity: "I am black" or "I am Puerto Rican." The foundation for racial identity, Tatum argues, is constructed in adolescence by peer pressure, societal influences and self-reflection; it is a time when children make choices about who they are.

The attitudes expressed by respondents to the TIME/CNN poll are all the more remarkable given that outside of school, black teens and white teens most often live in separate neighborhoods and sometimes, it seems, on separate planets. Danny, 17, a white Chicago youngster interviewed by TIME, professed to having "more black friends than I do white friends" but also admitted that "we just talk in school" and that he never visits the homes of his black buddies, who tend to live in crime-plagued housing projects.

Danny's situation is not uncommon. While few teens view their neighborhood as dangerous, 40% of black teens reported that they knew someone their age who had been murdered, in contrast to only 15% of white teens. Black teens also feel they don't get a fair shake from the police: one-third of them feel they are at risk of being treated unfairly by cops, while only 1 out of 5 white teens shares that fear. Real improvement in communication, says historian John Hope Franklin, head of President Clinton's task force on race, won't come until "you have improvement in the home conditions of kids of all kinds."

But growing up in a comparatively deprived environment doesn't necessarily lead to bad choices. In a direct counter to long-held stereotypes, the poll found that it is white kids, not black, who are most likely to have experimented with drugs and alcohol--by roughly 2 to 1.