Who are youth? Stereotypes & prejudice

Bogad (critically) presents the idea that all young people are viewed as “a one-dimensional category undifferentiated by gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and the like.” Not only as a still pretty young person, but even more as a YDev major, I hear this all the time. As soon as people hear I want to work with young people, half of the time they very kindly let me know that they could never do that because they “hate kids.” How bizarre would it be if someone said they want to do anything (having trouble thinking of a specific example because the only work specified by age is with young people or elderly people) and I responded that I hate adults??? Even on the flipside, I hear a lot of people in classes (honestly, particularly elementary ed people) say they’re there because they “love kids.” It’s a cool idea to generally like young people but also reinforces that “kids” are seen as one-dimensional and behaving in one particular way, regardless of environment, privilege/opportunity, personality, or anything besides their age. Adults are able to decide if they like that one model of youth and judge every young person accordingly.

That said, that really mostly applies when adults think about youth as a concept. When they see young people in society, suddenly they are not all the same. As Meyerson points out, black girls are disproportionately disciplined in schools and targeted & victimized by adult authority figures. In fact, black girls are barely even seen as young people at all. There is no place for them in the dominant schema of youth. So, young people being viewed as a one-dimensional category doesn’t mean that black girls are seen as behaving the same as white boys, it means that when people think of young people, they are really only thinking of white boys and trying to apply that to everyone. Maybe??

Another really interesting stereotype about young people is that they are going through phases and figuring out who they really are. Steinberg talks a lot about this idea, stating that “Issues of identity become points of ridicule, and many teachers and caregivers view choices as phases, stages, or unimportant fads.” Just think about the joke in the image here. (Worth noting that in searching for this image (“it’s not a phase mom”, half the results had bottom text saying “I really am a faggot.”) Theidea that the identity of any young person is fleeting, while the identity of any adult is their final form, suggests that for the first at least 20ish years of life, nobody has any real and valid identity. Young people are figuring out who they want to be, but what about who they are?

There was a definite shift in the way I experienced the world when I went from self-identifying as a queer person to being identified by other people as a queer person (at first mostly because of my relationship, then because of Pride Alliance). A moment that stands out, not as an act of hate but as a display of power over me, was when my girlfriend & I first started showing that we were a couple in public. We were on a bus ride back to campus, where we were living at the time, and kissed each other. (To give some context, we were not, like, making out. A peck if you will.) A man in a seat near us got our attention and asked us if we would “do that again for him.” When we ignored him, he spent the rest of the ride telling us we didn’t have to be “like that” because he didn’t mean any harm. As everyone else filed off the bus and we got closer to the final stop, I worried that we’d have to make the walk across a dead campus with him behind us. We didn’t, in the end, but that’s not the point. As a young person (18 at the time, while he was easily 30), a woman, and a queer person, a judgement was made about me, my behaviors, and my place in society. There have been people who have shown hatred toward me & my communities, but that moment of fear is what gives the hate meaning & weight.