Me and Mobilize.org’s Maya Enista were featured on Fox 5 News last night in a special segment about Generation Y. The piece was titled “Can Generation Y Deliver?” that ran with a companion text article called “Can Generation Y Keep America Great?” You can watch the video below (my clip begins at 1:45).
I think Maya and I tried to dispel some of the myths about our generation, yet the producers chose to focus on some of the more negative stereotypes associated with Millennials. Following our segment was a second piece that opened with a Baby Boomer business owner’s perceptions of his Generation Y employees. And that’s where it all started to go downhill.
Despite the constant interruptions by the biased reporter, the homie Swaptak held his own, and made an important point early on in the conversation:
There’s slackers in every generation.
Yes, there are also some 50 year olds out there sitting at their desks right now who may not be on Facebook, but who are not adding any real value to their company. So, it doesn’t make sense to attribute laziness to an entire generation simply because of our youth.
But this post isn’t about addressing all of the many #fails in the second segment. I just wanted to point out some of the problems with using this particular frame of pitting the younger generation vs. the older generation.
It Assumes That America Is, In Fact, Great
Yes, there are a lot of great things about our country, including the amazing legacy of service left by Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. But in many ways, that rich legacy is beginning to fall apart right along with our financial security. Have you seen the people in charge lately? Right now we are in desperate need of new, inspiring leadership to mend the social fabric of America and young people in every generation have always been able to bring that to the table. It’s also interesting how the older generation is slow to acknowledge their role in the shift in values that their kids may have grown up with. Many parents endeavored to give their kids everything they didn’t have, and now complain that Millennials have “had too much and they don’t realize what they do have and how to be grateful for what they’ve got.” One question: who were the ones who gave us “too much?” That’s right, our parents.
We also tend to forget that the America that Millennials were raised to live in is a much different America than the one older generations grew up in. My family, for instance, warned me against going into the military and instead encouraged me to get a college education and go out and make a good living for myself. Even though my grandfather fought for his country, he did not want that life for his granddaughter. He did not want me to ever have to go into war. He wanted me to live a different kind of life in a different kind of America.
Generation Y is Not a Monolith
Despite the plethora of studies that have been done on Millennials, the problem with most of them is that they represent a very narrow swath of young people: the white middle class. Yes, for some members of my generation, the typecast of not working hard and being entitled is true because they have been given everything. They have been spoiled. But for the rest of us, especially young people of color and low income Millennials, this is just not the reality. We have had to work damn hard just to fight our way into college and out of it. We have had to overcome enormous challenges of being raised in single-parent homes where there may not have been money to buy a computer or a cell phone to even begin to be “Digital Natives.” We have had to see our parents struggle to make ends meet, and for that reason, we try to figure out a way to create an easier life for ourselves. We don’t think we’re “too good” to deliver pizzas, we just know that we’re capable of so much more.
It Negates the Fact That Older Generations Use Technology, Too
Do you think that there aren’t 60 year old board members and CEOs who aren’t making money off of Twitter and Facebook? The technological inventions of my generation have allowed successful companies to become even more successful. Our constant “status updating” fuels an entire capitalist economy that our parents and grandparents profit from. If social media were as frivolous as they say, older people wouldn’t be using it at the same rate as young people.
‘Can Generation Y Keep America Great,’ then, is not a useful question for discussion. It’s actually really dumb if you think about the logic of potentially writing off a group of 80 million people living and working in America. We’re not going anywhere, y’all. For real. And if we want to have more productive collaboration across generations, we will need to get beyond the stereotypes and say what’s real. While it’s always a controversial media opportunity, nothing is ever really gained from these types of conversations.
So you can run and tell that. Homeboy.
