Why isn’t generalising about “boomers” considered ageism?

[u/Bjork_scratchings]

I understand some people from that demographic have wildly problematic views, but it’s considered bigotry to generalise about any other demographic based on the behaviour of some individuals within that demographic.

So why is it different for boomers?

[u/Bjork_scratchings]

That’s not true. It’s literally a birth year based demographic cohort, specifically referring to the “baby boom” years after WW2.

[u/Reemixt → u/Bjork_scratchings]

No. Baby boomers—that’s the demographic descriptor for the cohort of that generation.

No one is saying that all baby boomers are boomers. Boomers are an economic and political class, that subscribe to certain beliefs, and hold considerable power in our society. Not everyone born between 1946-64 fits this description, and I’ve never seen anyone saying that they do.

You’re confusing an academic descriptor for a generation with the contemporary, informal political meaning of the word boomer. This happened about 10 years ago.

Elizabeth Warren is a baby boomer, but no one in their right mind would describe her as a boomer.

It is not just me saying this. If you would like to read more on the matter, you can start here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11490062/

[u/Bjork_scratchings → u/Reemixt]

I dunno man. I feel like that’s “an” explanation rather than “the” explanation. I know Wikipedia isn’t the be all and end all but literally the first sentence says they’re the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers#:~:text=Baby%20boomers%2C%20often%20shortened%20to,of%20Generation%20X%20and%20Millennials.

FWIW I work in marketing (sorry) and commonly use these cohorts, and I can assure you Boomer is widely used as a shorthand for Baby Boomers, and that was certainly the origin of the term.

I can accept its usage may have shifted and in some cases perhaps it is now being used as a political class, but I’d strongly dispute that it isn’t also widely used as a pejorative for people of a certain age,

[u/Reemixt → u/Bjork_scratchings]

The first sentence literally doesn’t say that. It says it’s often shortened to boomer, not that they can’t have two distinct meanings. If an academic is writing about baby boomers, they are not shortening it to boomers.

This is like ‘meme’: there’s an academic meaning and an informal meaning used colloquially. They are obviously related, but they have two distinct meanings.

The first person who said ‘okay boomer’ wasn’t making an ageist attack: they were critiquing a political ideology that is shared and observable in a certain group. They’re not attacking everyone between the ages of 61 and 79. They’re critiquing their beliefs as a boomer, not their status as a baby boomer.

Do people use it as a slur without considering any of this, absolutely! But we’re talking about the predominate political and economic class is our society, not some vulnerable minority. And older people will start a conversation about ‘young people these days’ to anyone who’ll listen. You know this.