NPR could have done the whole story in 30 seconds. But instead it spent more than five minutes trying to grapple with a wonderful yet utterly inconvenient truth for the ostentatiously liberal network: Young people just aren’t as uptight about race as their parents, never mind their grandparents, are. And, by the way, the days of segregated swimming pools and neighborhoods haven’t merely “yielded” to “more subtle forms of discrimination”; they’ve yielded to — wait for it — less discrimination.

No, racism hasn’t vanished. And the legacy of racism still has a long half-life.

But the simple fact is “that’s racist” is the sort of thing those darn kids today say to make fun of their aging Gen X and baby boomer parents.

It’s also a common joke among conservatives, precisely because we’re used to being called racists for the weirdest things. If I write on Twitter something about how I don’t like “Obamacare,” some fellow right-winger will immediately respond with some variant of “that’s racist!”