{"id":160637,"date":"2022-11-11T04:10:32","date_gmt":"2022-11-11T04:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=160637"},"modified":"2022-11-18T19:28:32","modified_gmt":"2022-11-18T19:28:32","slug":"we-need-a-new-term-for-anti-youth-bigotry","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=160637","title":{"rendered":"We need a new term for anti-youth bigotry"},"content":{"rendered":"

We need a new term for anti-youth bigotry.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Professor Anthony Bernier<\/h4>\n

10 November 2022<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Sit down in an airport terminal, stand in line at the grocery store, lounge around drinking wine with friends, watch any media (especially Bill Maher\u2019s self-righteous \u201cReal Time\u201d), attend a Library Foundation function, or just pay attention at the Thanksgiving table \u2013 the story is the same: casual, unmitigated, unrestrained, and unqualified epithets launched against young people.<\/p>\n

Since the First Wave of feminism in the late 19th<\/sup>-century and carried forward through each successive advance in civil rights, American society has gradually learned that disparaging remarks against an entire social group comes freighted with social liabilities \u2013 accusations of misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitic, ableism.<\/p>\n

And rightly-so.<\/p>\n

The one group, however, somehow never included in this learning trajectory has been, and remains, our own young people.<\/p>\n

This universal and bigoted practice prevails under all social circumstances and is applied to any young people \u2013 though, of course, there are also different \u201cflavors\u201d of this bigotry depending on race, gender, nationality, etc. of the youth in question.<\/p>\n

But in nearly all social situations, one can pretty much say anything about young people and feel confident nobody will challenge or call you out as they would for generalizations about any<\/em> other social group:<\/p>\n

– \u201cYouth are dangerous.\u201d \u201cOf course, everyone knows that.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

– \u201cTeen brains…. this. Teen brains that\u2026\u201d Can\u2019t question \u201cscience.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

– \u201cKids are entitled and lazy.\u201d \u201cOh, let me tell you about my nephew!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

– \u201cKids are manipulated.\u201d \u201cWhat are those teachers filling them up with now!?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

– \u201cI\u2019m raising 3 teens\u2026\u201d Oh, you poor thing!<\/em><\/p>\n

– \u201cKids need this. Kids need that.\u201d They need discipline, or respect, or just fill-in-the-blank. <\/em><\/p>\n

YouthFacts\u2019 own Dr. Mike Males<\/a> (inventor of e<\/em><\/strong>phebiphobia<\/em> \u2013 fear of teenagers \u2013 way back in the 1990s) has cobbled together his own attempt to answer this current question: misoephebe <\/em>(from the Greek for youth hating).<\/p>\n

Certainly, some adults do manifest hatred of young people with their casual epithets. Many adults either say they do, or do actually, \u201clove young people.\u201d Either way, though, they engage these age-based slurs, too. In neither instance, however, are they called to account for them.<\/p>\n

It was either Molly Ivins or Ann Richards (both Texans) who called George Bush the Elder out: \u201cHe was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adults, like powerful people in general, deny their sources of power and simply assume, as in the instance with adults and youth, that mere age bestows talent or virtue.<\/p>\n

What more evidence do we need today to demonstrate how adults are not, by any stretch of the imagination, inherently virtuous?<\/p>\n

We need a new term to refer to this behavior. The mic is open\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We need a new term for anti-youth bigotry. Professor Anthony Bernier 10 November 2022 Sit down in an airport terminal, stand in line at the grocery store, lounge around drinking wine with friends, watch any media (especially Bill Maher\u2019s self-righteous \u201cReal Time\u201d), attend a Library Foundation function, or just pay attention at the Thanksgiving table […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-160637","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/160637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=160637"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/160637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160678,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/160637\/revisions\/160678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=160637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}