Tumblr struggles with ageism, probably because it can’t be oversimplified into “the good guys vs the oppressors.” Racism is a complex phenomenon, but most of the time we can still simplify it as “white oppressors vs POC oppressed.” Ageism spills out into all the directions - the young, the old and sometimes even the middle aged are all oppressed in various ways and it becomes even more complex when it interacts with misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. So when you’re trying to encapsulate ageism into a snappy graphic, it just doesn’t work and I think because of that ageism gets interpreted as a “lesser” form of oppression, like it’s just not as important as racism or misogyny.
After the emergency budget was announced last week, a lot of people picked up on the fact that young people would be hit hardest. The right to housing benefit is gone, the right to education maintenance grants is gone and the minimum wage will not apply to under 25s. Meanwhile, children will be affected by changes to household benefit caps and tax credits. This will mean more children growing up in poverty, more young people forced to stay in abusive homes for longer, more young people with no educational route out of poverty and more young people who find that hard work by itself is not enough.
But if you point to the idea that young people are an oppressed group in their own right (even without taking race/gender/orientation into account), people kinda shrug and there isn’t the level of outrage you’d expect. Even plenty of young people themselves just seem resigned to it. In fact, many of the mainstream media outlets generally didn’t even pick up on this angle last week, with Robert Peston going so far to describe this as a “red” budget.
What people seem to miss is that oppression of young people links into just about every other social problem. It’s the reason nobody listened to children in Rochdale who came forward about sexual exploitation and it’s the reason that thousands of adults are only now coming forward about sexual abuse they suffered in childhood. It’s there in the fact that young people are overwhelmingly left-wing and yet the last 50 years of politics has been the story of right-wing governments judging young people and determining that Britain is “broken.” It’s there in the fact we encourage young people to want material success and then judge them for wanting an iPhone. It’s there in the fact that we are dismissive of young people who talk about their experiences of racism, sexism and homophobia. By ignoring ageism against young people, we reinforce every other kind of oppression.
But of course this is complicated by the fact that we also oppress older adults on the basis of their age. Many of today’s pensioners have spent decades paying into the welfare system only to learn that they must sell their houses to afford social care. We constantly talk of the ageing population as a “ticking timebomb,” reinforcing the idea that older adults are a burden and a problem we would prefer to be without. We tell older adults they will have to work longer to be comfortable in retirement, but simultaneously resent them for taking jobs away from younger people. And then we’re surprised when people dehumanise and abuse them. By de-valuing older adults, we reinforce every other kind of oppression.
So if you’re thinking you can just deal with politics by looking at the parties and the policies and leaving all the bigger societal stuff to one side, you’re underestimating how entrenched all this shit is. What unites young people and older adults? It’s their lack of economic power. They are less likely to work, more likely to need support and they have less spending power. It is because they are considered less valuable to a system that rates people on economic usefulness that we feel comfortable in ignoring them. And because young people can’t or won’t vote and older adults are generally fixed in their voting behaviours, politicians generally aren’t interested either.
I suppose my point here for anyone who is interested in social justice or oppression is that we need to wake the fuck up about ageism. Yes, it’s difficult to get thousands of notes on a topic where there are multiple oppressed groups. Yes, it’s hard to separate ageism out from misogyny and racism sometimes. But ageism is killing people just like those other problems are. We can’t shrug our shoulders and leave it just because you have to look a little harder to notice it’s there.
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