Generation Z 18/10/20

I’ve recently begun second year at university and after having spoken to various mates also at this sort of middle stage of our lives (or at least of our three year course programmes) about their courses, I’ve come to realise that it seems all of a sudden that education is becoming progressive (or trying to be at least?). This can be duly noted in the texts I’ve been assigned for literature which not only include things written by black people and by women respectively, but even things authored by black women. A voice which, particularly those writing before the 19th century, one can’t be criticised for assuming would continue unheard until our generation became the next set of university lecturers. 

So far we’ve looked at the effects on nationhood of forgetting about our brutal and violent colonial past (thanks Napoleon, really did us a solid there), explored the issues with trying to represent the oppression of female sexuality as a man, as well the issues of voicing a West Indian female slave’s narrative as, you can probably guess, once again a white man. Nevertheless, I can’t say I’m not pleased that our course unit directors, largely white, male and above the age of 35 themselves, though I won’t hold that against them, have chosen to use their positions of privilege in order to unearth and expose us to this certainly more inclusionary content. It’s just that after a first year of studying Shakespeare and Beowulf, I was a little surprised. But then again, it had to be done at some point and maybe waiting on our generation of self appointed human rights pioneers was giving ourselves a little too much credit. 

More and more recently I’m hearing the phrase ‘Generation Z’, which I think is the one I’m apart of. I’ve never heard of a generation ‘A’ or ‘B’ but somehow here we are, apparently 26 breeding cycles down the line. Generation Z tends to be referred to usually in conjunction with key words such as ‘progressive’, ‘open-minded’, even ‘left’. And I know what you’re thinking, what’s wrong with that? Surely you’ve not going to pick fault with labels as positive as those? And no, I’m not, I’m just going to unpick them a little bit because people my age seem to wear this sort of badge of honour that they happened to have been born in the early 2000s, as if that fact itself has shaped their moral character and thereby subsequently justifies all of their decisions. Ought we not to stop and consider that probably every generation before our own has worn these same labels, believing their mindset to be the most up-to-date, their actions the most justifiable and objectively ‘right’? 

Sure it’s great that as a whole we tend to consider things like sexism, racism and class-bias as generally frowned up social faux-pas, but we do so in such a way that perhaps for the first time, there is almost a fear of opposition to our ideologies en-masse. Its less a case of several oppositional sides as we have seen throughout history, and more of ‘Generation Z’ against anything or anyone they deem to be not ‘liberal’ enough. And yes I am aware of how further ensconced I’ve made myself in this generation through my criticism of white male patriarchy in the first part of this article, but surely self awareness has got to count for something. 

In the past centuries, there was conflict and revolution and political debate about the best way to live our lives. Absolutely we still have all of those things now but I think more than ever before, there are certain ideas which we as a generation consider to be objectively correct which aren’t necessarily, and it is this mindset, this sense of almost righteousness that we millennials have, that actually makes me fearful of our future transformation into a new sort of tyranny. How can we claim to be equal and progressive if we instinctually shut down ideas that don’t necessarily align with our own and presume that everything we do believe is right? Surely the recent BLM movement has shown at least the white population of our age group that boy did we have a few things to educate ourselves on.*

 Furthermore, I think it squanders any sort of notion that positive change doesn't always necessarily come from 'our' side. A key example of this is wor Maggie Thatcher. Now don’t get me wrong, you will never get me to idolise that woman as some sort of feminist role-model, ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher’ will forever be relevant to the conservative legacy she left behind, and every year at the annual Durham Miners Gala I will of course unit with my fellow socialists into a group sing-along of ‘Ding Dong the witch is dead’ in an act of hostile resentment for the ‘Iron Lady’. However, it can’t be denied that as a woman in politics, she did prove that we are capable of occupying the same roles as men, even if it that was only a by-product of her actions. In fact many of the awful things she did were no worse than what men before her had done, but in the true nature of our society, she became a victim of her gender as it provided another way in which she could be torn down and criticised. In that way then, though she may not have strove for female solidarity herself, perhaps inevitably she’s not completely separate from it as through gender-based criticism of the woman, she at least became another case study for the existence of misogyny within our society. 

As a representative for women, of course one could also argue that the mess Thatcher made of the country whilst she was in office reflected so badly on women’s capabilities that she actually pushed feminism back a few years. To this I insist that we look to her not as a representative for women, but of the tory party for which she stood. Thatcher herself certainly paid women no mind, allowing only one woman to sit in cabinet the whole time she was in office. Maggie certainly wasn’t in politics to make a point about feminism and rave against the patriarchy, almost subversively, it seemed like she wanted to be one of the patriarchs. However through her role can definitely be described as matriarchal rather than feminist, she will always be ‘the first female primeminister’, leaving behind a legacy. For comparison, I just had to look up Theresa May’s name as it had slipped my mind.

*A note on white privilege throughout the recent pandemic in relation to the events associated with the BLM movement: 

Perhaps one of the biggest and most shocking things that the BLM movement unearthed for me is that there is inarguably a culture of whiteness which fetishises black death (often at the hands of police brutality) through the re-posting or re-publication of videos of black people being murdered, without active engagement with the victims of that racism and oppression i.e the black community itself. It’s easy to see how white people may believe themselves to be showing support via their privileged platform, however ultimately what ends up being conveyed is a lack of understanding and a sense of ‘white-splaining’ which does more to disable the oppressed voice than to provide an outlet for it. Bakary Diaby in his essay ‘‘Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism’ would characterise this as the “present-day trap of having white voices stand in for Black ones”. What white people including myself would I think really benefit from is sitting down, shutting up, and listening before we go assuming that we’re as liberal as could possibly hope to be and possess no areas for improvement.