"Meanwhile, poverty reporting is usually divorced from the generational conversation. Many of the exploited nail salon workers in Sarah Maslin Nir’s viral expose are technically “millennials.” So is Dasani’s mother, prominently featured in Andrea Elliott’s 2013 blockbuster portrait of a homeless New York family. Stories about young black men in prison and homeless youth don’t have “millennial” in the headline, nevermind the text. The underlying message is that working class people live in a trendless vacuum. They don’t fit into navel-gazing generational narratives.
This appalling cognitive dissonance isn’t new. Media obsessions over Gen X and Baby Boomers were just as focused on the richer half of the generation. “I knew the phrase to make a living could have absolutely no meaning to these children of the affluent society,” sneered a Life magazine writer in 1968, erasing the nearly 10 percent of young people who were living in desperate poverty at the time. TIME magazine bemoaned the entitlement of “twentysomethings” in 1990: “They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder.” As if every twentysomething had a choice between a thrilling adventure and a hedge fund job."
http://fusion.net/story/266481/the-big-millennial-lie/
I find myself continuing to really appreciate the millennial term, but it's definitely a specific one. I am constantly in a cycle of forgetting and reminding myself that I'm really talking about college-educated urbanites, not everyone.
It's very erasing, and I need to think again about the value I see in using the term and how to maintain that without continuing to contribute to the erasure.
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