Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry

May 19, 2015 9:25 AM

Why we need to ditch generational labels.
posted by Shepherd (43 comments total)

But... but... how am I supposed to write anguished thinkpieces about my younger and older coworkers if I can't slap a trite label on them?
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:39 AM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]

*jumps on and then off of lawn*
posted by jonmc at 9:43 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

This is so nice!

Since I’m a ‘Gen-X’er born in 1977, the conventional wisdom is that I’m supposed to be adaptable, independent, productive, and to have a good work/life balance.

This is not what they were saying about us in the nineties. It's a particularly hilarious illustration of how whoever is youngest will always be defined as the bad failures - we were bad failures when we were in our twenties, now it's the "millenials". It's just like with any minoritized group - whatever they do and whoever they are, they're bad. The youngest people will always be demonized (unless people consciously stop doing so) because we live in a society that fetishizes physical youth but is deeply anti-actual-young-people and deeply authoritarian. It's just like women can't win - you can wear a modest dress or a miniskirt, keep quiet or speak loudly, be young or old, but you'll be Doing It Wrong because Being A Woman is wrong under patriarchy.

Also this:

Most helpfully for our purposes, Mannheim cautioned the reader to recognise the existence of diverse ‘generation units’. Disambiguation – say, between the present-day youth of Fairfax County and young people living in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas or the South Side in Chicago – was essential. As evidence, he pointed to European peasants living outside of cities in the 18th and 19th centuries, who couldn’t possibly have the same perspective as their urban, educated brethren on the upheavals of revolution. It was tempting, he admitted, to make literary or artistic groups stand in for the rest of their generation, since such self-reflective, highly analytical groups made entelechies really visible. ‘But if we pay exclusive attention to them,’ he warned, ‘we shall not be able really to account for this vector structure of intellectual currents.’

Which perfectly sums up how all that "the boomers are so evil and selfish" stuff pisses me off. I don't recognize any of the boomers that I actually know in the stereotype, because the ones I know are working class/lower middle class left liberals who vote for social services and tax increases every chance they get or else lifelong hippie activists who have never had money or else crusading anti-war nuns.
posted by Frowner at 9:46 AM on May 19, 2015 [36 favorites]

Reading these characteristics feels like browsing a horoscope.

This is true of all list-of-characteristics that are intended to represent a large group of people. I'd argue that some of them are mostly true for everyone, based on major themes in society. Not everyone is made from a cookie cutter mold, but they still contain eggs and water. Some of us are flourless, or have chocolate chips.

I'm curious about something. Recently I was on a part of the internet where it came to my attention that a subsection of the American male population is obsessed with athletic shoes. It's used as a status symbol, almost. This section seems primarily composed of young people of a minority skin color. I really wanted to understand why this was the way it seems.. and hit a road block of trying to figure out how to ask that question without generalizing or seeming racist.

I am just beyond frustrated at the nitpicking. I am all for not assuming a person of [descriptor] is [stereotype] only because of that descriptor.. and I can see why it would anger and annoy someone if they were..

But how exactly do you go about having an intelligent conversation about it without someone's hackles getting raised? I want to have a conversation with another person and get their particular specific opinion and thoughts on the matter, otherwise I'd look up research and studies.. and there's no guarantee that those are free of their own forms of discrimination.

I know if someone asked me "Hey, [Uncommon Dyed Hair Color] [Uncommon Weight] [Female-Appearing] American! Why are you [weight]?" I'd be happy to give an intelligent answer. Note, this is different from making a random comment about how I look without talking to me first. Maybe they'll assume I have [disease] or that I'm [level of activity level]. That's when I take offense, and I think everyone should.. but that's not a conversation.

/soapbox
posted by royalsong at 9:53 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I hate the way we Boomers just label whole groups of people and make sweeping assertions about them and the way they supposedly go round labelling people.
posted by Segundus at 10:03 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

born in 1977

Revivalist.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:03 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

I keep getting spammed by the Dale Carnegie folks about "engaging millenials in the workplace" and I keep deleting the mail and thinking "If there's such a thing as a 'millenial' I hope their uniting character attribute is hating being called a group."
posted by Matt Oneiros at 10:08 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's a particularly hilarious illustration of how whoever is youngest will always be defined as the bad failures - we were bad failures when we were in our twenties, now it's the "millenials".

Obligatory.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:09 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

As someone about the same age of the author, who hence also may well still be alive around the time that climate change starts killing people in large numbers, I heartily approve of this effort to firmly ensconce ahead of time the norm that you can't blame or criticize anyone based on their membership in a particular generation.

That's some forward thinking there. I'm proud to be part of the generation that has finally started doing something to prepare for the consequences of climate change, by making sure no particular generation gets faulted for not having done more.
posted by XMLicious at 10:10 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

People younger than me should be seen and not heard. People older than me should be neither seen nor heard. TIA for your cooperation.
posted by entropicamericana at 10:10 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I don't recognize any of the boomers that I actually know in the stereotype

My mother's parents fit it precisely, with the exception that they claim to vote Democrat so I'll always have certain aspects of healthcare. I don't argue with them because I'm living on stock dividends they gave me.
posted by WizardOfDocs at 10:12 AM on May 19, 2015

And then the author starts using the term "millennials" to address people of a certain age at the end of this. (Yes, the term was created by journalist authors who started a consulting firm. They'd tried "13th Gen" for Americans of my age group, but then "Gen X" caught on, although it came from a Canadian and had first been used by photographer Robert Capa to describe post-WWII young people. You could look this up, then spare yourself the rest of the article, then try to tune out the bullshit.)
posted by raysmj at 10:29 AM on May 19, 2015

My mother's parents fit it precisely, with the exception that they claim to vote Democrat so I'll always have certain aspects of healthcare. I don't argue with them because I'm living on stock dividends they gave me.

I mean, my point isn't that there are no evil selfish people of that generation - it's that as a blanket descriptor it's almost useless - and, I would argue, actively harmful when it's used to attack things that benefit older people, eg social security.

(Another reason I'm really wary of the "evil boomers broke the world" thing - it seems to segue readily into "let's punish them by getting rid of social services!!!!" Leaving all else aside, that would translate into many, many people - lots of them poor - suddenly having to support their aging, infirm parents 100% or else see them starve on the street. Why? Because actually quite a lot of retired people don't have much besides social security!)

That's some forward thinking there. I'm proud to be part of the generation that has finally started doing something to prepare for the consequences of climate change, by making sure no particular generation gets faulted for not having done more.

Yeah, I guess you're right - if we only, say, flogged a bunch of sixty-five-year-olds in the public square and then confiscated their social security, that would fix climate change pretty fast! It would be especially satisfying if we chose random boomers - like, one of them could be a former CEO, one of them could have been lifelong adjunct faculty, one could be a Vietnam vet with PTSD, one could be a woman who worked in a factory until the factory moved overseas in the eighties and then she existed by working odd jobs....I completely agree, blaming generations is totally effective and intellectually consistent!

Plus all those, you know, seventies environmentalists who are now retirement age - fuck a bunch of them, too.
posted by Frowner at 10:33 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

I remember that 13th Gen book when it came out. I remember going, wait, is this bullshit? It seems like bullshit. But it was inescapable bullshit. Any protest was met with, oh you Gen-X, so cynical! So soaked in irony!

And then irony apparently died on 9/11, and that was supposed to teach us a lesson, I think. I remember a lot of think pieces to that effect.

Douglas Coupland, the supposed sage of Gen-X, did have a pretty good hate on for the Boomers, so if you liked him, you sort of absorbed that attitude.

But of course, his characters were well-off white kids, so, at some point, it did seem like a lot of whining over nothing.

And then the next batch of (white) kids got old enough and the media moved on.

I can't imagine a nonwhite kid, or a non-rich one, seeing much of anything of themselves in the media's generation categories.

In conclusion: yes, it was bullshit.
posted by emjaybee at 10:37 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

There's a lot of bad analysis that goes under the generational label. But there are also valid statistical generalizations to be made. For instance, there are clear unemployment and wealth differentials between the generations, and not unsurprisingly there are major partisan differences as well.

In conclusion, generations are a land of contrasts when p<0.05.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:45 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

So soaked in irony!
And then irony apparently died on 9/11, and that was supposed to teach us a lesson, I think.

And then hipsters resurrected irony in the form of trucker caps, beards, and fixed-gear bikes.

Anyway, if we're doing away with the generation blaming thing, can we also kill the "digital natives" vs "digital immigrants" idea too?
posted by Foosnark at 10:49 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Since I’m a ‘Gen-X’er born in 1977, the conventional wisdom is that I’m supposed to be adaptable, independent, productive, and to have a good work/life balance.

When the hell did this become the conventional wisdom about Gen X? They called us "slacker" so many times that was practically the official label of our generation. The subtitle of Strauss and Howe's book about us was Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?.

A couple of thoughts: 1) I'm not sure that generational analysis is a bad thing; I do think it is often badly done. The author is right that a lot of it comes down to anecdata selected to fit a preconceived narrative. But there are some clear and lasting differences in generations. The American WWII generation assumed power when the war ended, and basically ran the country until Clinton. It was their show for 50 years. The generation that was just too young to fight in the war or be deeply shaped by it never had that kind of influence. There are obvious differences in things like voting patterns. The generation lens is a useful one, even though it shouldn't be the only one.

2) You often hear people say "every generation things the one growing up after them is lazy/ill-mannered/doomed." I don't think that's true. Sure you can find some quotes throughout history, but that's just as lazy as the anecdata used in the millennial trend articles. One dude in 500 B.C. doth not a universally true trend make. The very fact that someone always says "yes, well, people have always said that and it isn't true" shows that a lot of us aren't saying it. And some generations have been generally proclaimed as the bright young industrious saviors of society--again, the WWII generation was treated this way from early on.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 10:58 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

You know, labels are ok sometimes when discussing specific things related to populations. But, we should always remember they are post hoc, and have no intrinsic meaning.

I guess that's the rub, isn't it?
posted by clvrmnky at 11:08 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

I went to a workshop out of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums. One of the segments was a guided chatshop about the differences in these generations. One commentator was a "millenial" woman who was putting together arts events for a University museum. She wanted input on hosting events for seniors. We asked her what age are your seniors? She said, "Boomers and greatest generation folks." We explained that if they called it a senior event, no boomers would attend, not unless they were accompanying elderly parents. Several people backed this up. She looked one way in front of her like a robin eyeing a worm, then the other way, then she was speechless for a moment, because she was having attendance problems at her events and so we went on a long time about how you do get boomers out to events. The main strategy seemed to be avoid the subject of age with their demographic.

It folds in nicely, to drop the age discussion and focus on making interesting exhibits to draw the interests of various groups.
posted by Oyéah at 11:19 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I have no opinion on other generations, but I will maintain that MY generation had the best music.
posted by monospace at 11:19 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

changing the way that whine is sold!
posted by thelonius at 11:25 AM on May 19, 2015

I'm an old (58) hoping to get older. Much older. And I've never, ever understood any of the generation-labeling shit. Ever. I blame the mainstream media, my former industry. Luckily, I was never forced to write or edit anything about various generations. (To the best of my knowledge, anyway.) Like all other broad and reductionist stereotyping, it's just dumb.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:27 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think what ________ says about ________ says more about ________ than it does about ________.
posted by Foosnark at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry

I don't even know what this means. If it's benign then it isn't "bigotry" and if it's bigotry then it isn't benign.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:51 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

But there are some clear and lasting differences in generations. The American WWII generation assumed power when the war ended, and basically ran the country until Clinton. It was their show for 50 years.

But who is "they"? Working class women? The black middle class? Latina lesbians? Mill workers from the Smokies?

There are some tightly defined ways in which "generational" analysis is useful - I think it would be reasonable to say, for instance, "gay men who came of age during the AIDS crisis generally share certain experiences of fear, stigma and loss" or "women who were in their thirties when no fault divorce became legal shared certain experiences around marriage" or something like that. I think a kind of negative generational analysis is useful - people who, for instance, were unlikely to have private telephone lines in their homes would share some norms around communication that people who were likely to have such lines would not.

But even with the "don't call boomers 'elders' if you want them to come to your events" bit - not only are you already talking about people who are likely to come to museum events, which narrows things down by class and probably by race (since there is data showing that white USians visit museums the most often) but you're also not talking about anyone from a community where "elder" isn't an embarrassment - so you're unlikely to be describing Native communities, for instance.

Also, I surmise that the large group that gets lumped as boomers isn't nearly as homogenous in just regular experience of technology and world events as everyone supposes - for pete's sake, you could have one person born in 1946 and one in 1964, and they're both supposed to be boomers. Born in 1946? You have a clear memory of SNCC and Freedom Riders and Martin Luther King. Born in 1964? You might conceivably remember King's assassination. Born in 1946? You're a working adult when the oil shocks hit. 1964? You're ten. It's a mute, stupid category.
posted by Frowner at 11:51 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

Social scientists and popularizers are struggling with a category error: because there are a couple of a truly significant / transformative 20th century generations that are amenable to important generalizations (the "Greatest Generation" and their children the Boomers), you should be able to make similar generalizations and impact observations about other age cohorts.
posted by MattD at 11:53 AM on May 19, 2015

And of course the Baby Boomers are a significant generalization mostly because of sheer numbers, and the accommodations that the culture, politics and economy must make to those sheer numbers -- whether it was tens of thousands of schools built between 1955 and 1975 or the fundamental changes to the tax and health care system that will be made between 2020 and 2030 to deal with their retirement and health care costs.
posted by MattD at 11:58 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The fact that people are using white middle class generations as a way of speaking for all generations is not as devastating a critique of generational analysis as the title might suggest.
posted by corb at 12:07 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The U.S. Census Bureau only recognizes one American age group as a "cohort" and it's the Baby Boomer group, born between 1946 and 1964 (which is 18 years, not the 20 I usually see listed as a "generation"). Reason:

Distinctions between the baby boom cohort and birth cohorts from preceding and subsequent years become apparent when fertility measures are framed within a historical context. The baby boom in the United States was marked by a substantial rise in birth rates post-World War II. Two features of the baby boom differentiate this increase from those previously experienced: the size of the birth cohort and the length of time for which these higher levels of fertility were sustained.

The "cohort" is worthy of being studied for its effects on public policy and government budgets.

Now, income differences among age groups? Is this more an effect of the recession, and changes in the economy generally? Will they last? Were adult students who were back in or just going to college around the same time just as effected? What about older people who were laid off and were unemployed for long periods?

Anyway, so much of what I see listed as common to "millennials" has to do with age, not some mysticall generational status. Say, this idea that This Generation Loves Bicycles. Well, the federal government started providing matching grants for bike trails way back in the early '90s, during the Clinton years. The funding continually increased over the next decade, and picked up over the past few years, under Obama. So there are more bike trails out there. And when are people more likely to ride bikes, at least in the U.S., where most bike trails don't lead to many commercial districts? People with less income, in better physical condition, and without children.

I've heard the same about millennials and farmer's markets and wanting to spend less on good or organic food. You've had an increase in farmer's markets and healthier food going on a couple of decades or more now. Whole Foods has made inroads into smaller cities. Meanwhile, it has more competition in larger cities. Age is an important variable in there (more likely to want to save money, shop around), but it's not the whole kit and caboodle.

(Also, irony took off among people of my age group due to the influence of David Letterman, who was older than most of audience. His influence is maintained among so many of the top comedians, actors and showrunners and such today, thus... Irony is Dead. Viva Irony! Also general silliness and self-deprecation.)
posted by raysmj at 12:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

When the hell did this become the conventional wisdom about Gen X? They called us "slacker" so many times that was practically the official label of our generation. The subtitle of Strauss and Howe's book about us was Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?.

Yea, this confused me as well. There's even a movie!
posted by echocollate at 12:40 PM on May 19, 2015

I blame Tom Brokaw and his "Greatest Generation" bullshit.
The grew-up-in-the-Great-Depression-fought-in-WWII gang were the absolute model for Entitlement (my father and his friends were among 'em) and never stopped telling us Baby Boomers how lucky we had it (which for me, a White Cis Male brought up in a Middle Class Xtian household was actually true). But as I have stated before, my 'tribe' turned into the worst people alive today, for which you can directly blame our parents.

irony took off... due to the influence of David Letterman... thus... Irony is Dead. Viva Irony!
Well, Dead as of 12:35AM Thursday Morning, after 32 years. That's more than a Generation. But seriously, I learned long ago that Irony is SO much easier than Real Comedy.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:03 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm a Generation X'er and refuse to be labelled.
posted by jimmythefish at 3:45 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

To put this in perspective, I am, technically, a late boomer (according to StatsCan, which uses a different metric than the US) but I recall being the target of hand-wringing in my high school years. School boards were taking courses on how to handle us "Generation X" kids, who did not respond to the same things earlier generations did.

In this case, some educators may have got some useful information, but relying too heavily on these post hoc definitions, or thinking they have wider meaning across a population is an error.
posted by clvrmnky at 5:18 PM on May 19, 2015

Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry

Uh oh, sounds like more mollycoddled Millennial horseshit.

(See. It's only benign if you're bad at it.)
posted by dgaicun at 6:19 PM on May 19, 2015

Our workplace includes Generational Differences in-class training in its non-supervisory leadership curriculum. After a few hours, I realized that it's actually in there to teach people to talk about race and class at work. It suggests many of the same skills and assumptions that are helpful when dealing with cultural differences formed for reasons other than age, but about a topic that is far less fraught. It's like training wheels for actually hard discussions.
posted by persona at 7:35 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I work with plenty of millennials. They're really not all that different from their predecessors, except with more technology and less jobs and less hope. Stop giving them shit.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:27 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Boomers are still the Worst Generation, though. I'd look forward to their upcoming spiral towards extinction if it wasn't something I had to subsidize.

(Benign!)
posted by dgaicun at 1:16 AM on May 20, 2015

Generational thinking is bunk, even for boomers. The 'boomers' are identified by an 18-year span of fertility. Even leaving out race, gender and class, that is practically their only common feature. What does an 18-year-old have in common with a newborn baby?

When you say 'boomer' you are generally pointing at someone born between 1946 and 1951. I am boomer but I was born in 1958. Those fellow boomers were the middle-management gatekeepers I had to go through to get my first jobs. Many of them have already passed 65 - pension age for them - but I have a decade to go before I qualify. In fact, courtesy of laws made by those older boomers I have to work two more years than them - to age 67 - before I (maybe) qualify for a pension. That's how monolithic we boomers are. I doubt later 'generations' are any more meaningful.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 8:10 AM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

Stevie Wonder laid down some pretty serious thinking about when and where we happened to be born, and perhaps why. The song As is certainly one of my go-tos when I'm feeling overwhelmed by this-that-other-things.

We all know sometimes lifes hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space
But you can bet you life times that and twice its double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed
so make sure when you say you're in it but not of it
You're not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called Hell
Change your words into truths and then change that truth into love
And maybe our children's grandchildren
And their great-great grandchildren will tell
posted by philip-random at 8:23 AM on May 20, 2015

Ya, people are born every day, not once every 20 years. That's the way the world works.

But people also like to categorize, and create discrete groups where nonesuch exist.

All I ask is that if we are killing the generational labels, can we also kill the gender labels while we're at it?

Irony is SO much easier than Real Comedy

Irony IS real comedy. Some of the REALIST!
posted by mrgrimm at 10:51 AM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Always nice to see someone poking holes in Strauss and Howe. Their pop history is, while limited as people have noted in this thread, about a jillion times better than the predictive BS and the classification BS that has sprung out of it.
posted by immlass at 2:32 PM on May 20, 2015

Why Early-'80s Babies Are Different Than Other Millennials
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:46 PM on May 23, 2015

Why Early-'80s Babies Are Different Than Other Snake People
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:28 AM on May 27, 2015 [1 favorite]