(4 of 5)
One of these cyberhatemongers, a National Socialist White Peoples' Party member named "Wolf" who is based in Toledo, Ohio, is a "good example of a youth recruiter," says a researcher, who requested that her name not be used. "He has a lot of catchy slogans. He seems attracted to kids who are having problems at home. He becomes their father. They'll go on and on, talking about their schoolwork, their community, whatever is bothering them today. Then Wolf brings in National Socialism. He'll say, 'You can find family here.'"
In the face of that, the teenagers polled by TIME/CNN retain a bracing sense of optimism; three-fourths of the white youngsters believe race relations will get better, as do more than half the black teens (adults of both races are more skeptical). "What we're seeing here is a hidden aspect of the black survival process," says Michael Eric Dyson, author of Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line and a visiting professor at Columbia University's Institute for Research in African-American Studies. "You imagine a reality better than the one in which you presently live. I wouldn't call it optimism; it goes too deep. It's hope. Hope goes against everything you can see."
That hope sometimes flies in the face of the pessimism and racial intolerance teenagers hear expressed by their elders. Thecla Hoeberechts, 13, who is of Dutch and Greek ancestry, often plays in Ridgefield Park, N.J., with friends of different races. Thecla says an older friend recently asked her why she hangs out with black people all the time: "She said, 'Look how loud and rude they are.'" Children of color face similar pressures. Cynthia Bou, 13, a Dominican-American friend of Thecla's, says an older cousin asked her why some of her friends are white. "White people are whack," she warned Cynthia. "You're going to change when they treat you wrong."
Parents too can serve as regressive influences, though perhaps less so than in the past. One out of 8 white teens and 1 out of 9 black youngsters say they've heard their parents say something negative about another race. One white father in Bridgeport, in an interview, went on at length about his capacity for racial tolerance (he helps send holiday turkeys to poor black families), but when he was asked about the subject of interracial dating, he declared, "Listen, if Jesus himself stepped down off the Cross asking to date my daughter, and he was black? I'd tell the guy to go to hell."
Some observers see trouble ahead because of the continued deprivation of so many black families in wrecked city neighborhoods. (Less than half the black teens polled live with a father or stepfather.) "This generation of kids we're raising now in these urban centers have no conscience, no values," says the Rev. B. Herbert Martin, minister of Chicago's People's Church. "They are growing up in isolation."