COLORBLIND

0 Comments | USA TODAY, February, 2006 | by Sharon Jayson

Ryan Knapick and Josh Baker have been best friends since fifth grade. Colette Gregory entered the picture in high school. She and Josh are dating now. Knapick is white, Gregory is black, and Baker is half-Hispanic. To them, race doesn't matter.

"People are finding people with common interests and common perspectives and are putting race aside," says Knapick, 22, a May graduate of Indiana University who works at a machine shop and lives with his parents in Munster, Ind.

He and his friends are among an estimated 46.3 million Americans ages 14 to 24 -- the older segment of the most diverse generation in American society. (Most demographers say this "Millennial" generation began in the early 1980s, after Generation X.) These young people have friends of different races...