larkandkatydid:

larkandkatydid:

I feel like a lot of bogus theories about generation gaps could be explained/contextualized/debunked by just remember that older people are just significantly whiter and white people are significantly older.  Like, no individual is more or less political virtuous than any one else…it’s just the most common age for a white American is 55 and the most common age for a black American is 24, for a Hispanic American it’s 8.   And to the extent that the old really do hate the young, I think it’s clear that this is much more a racial divide than a truly generational one. 

This is also true for “hating kids discourse”.

At the end of the day, I believe strongly that meaningful-at-the-policy level hatred for children has very little do with children and a lot to do with race:

• 63% of the US population is non-Hispanic white
• 75% of US residents between 55-64 are white
• 50% of US children under 5 are white

No one is actually going to care if a 23 year old, who is a kid themselves, does that thing kids do where they are super hostile to the age cohort right below them, the 23 year old version of when 8 year olds want to stab Barney. It’s fine. It’s one of humanity’s dozen or so annoying developmental moments.  

But the shit that does harm kids can’t be separated from the way that kids of color become stand-ins for older white people’s disengagement from a social structure that doesn’t (as much) disproportionately benefit them.   For some big and obvious examples:  the general trend of cutting back on social services created around the baby boomer generation,  the divestment in public schools and universities and the related push for charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling, the overall rising popularity of ways that white families can decline participation in integrated public spaces.  This also includes the criminalization of children and the sloth-like pace of state lawmakers in obeying the Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life without parole. 

To the extent that this bleeds in to every day hating kids discourse, I think it’s important to think about what images are in people’s heads when they talk about teenagers being “intimidating” or “destructive” or feeling frightened of teenagers in public spaces, especially if the people having this discussion are white…Which teenagers are we thinking of? How are they acting? Why is their behavior frightening? 

Or how we talk about kids being too loud or too inappropriate or that their parents are clearly neglecting them which is why they are annoying us….what kids? What parents? What is the behavior?  What slack are we cutting/not cutting this parent that we would/wouldn’t cut someone who looked different?

Or, what changes when we make some kind of child-free space?  How else does the demographics of that environment change?  At least in my experience with living in divided/gentrifying neighborhoods,  the gentrifying population tends to be much more likely to be childless than the neighborhood was before.