Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for
whatever it was we did wrong. What we did *was* wrong. But we think you're
crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you
care? You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most
convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess
and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning.
We were brainwashed.
Thank you, John Hughes, for your
timeless words. A legendary screenwriter, producer and director, and an icon of
the 1980s, his word still ring true about the power of stereotypes, of
“simplest terms” and “convenient definitions.” We may not read physical
newspapers, we have laptops instead of PCs and David Bowie is the guy who
judged the walk-off in Zoolander, but
I know millenials can still relate. From the perspective of older generations,
we are categorized, defined, classified, tagged. Dividing people into schema is
something we all do for things that are unfamiliar – our brains would be on
overload if we didn’t. But today, the Mr. Vernon’s of the world are fascinated
with the idea of labeling the millennial generation - as much if not more than
those fascinated with the teens of the 1980s, which was the first “me”
generation. Today, I see journalists, pop culture analysts and marketing
consultants constantly analyzing the power of the millenials.
I too wanted to analyze the power of the
millenials, so I put on my John Hughes glasses and looked through (what would
be now considered hipster) lenses. In his films, he allowed audiences to
delight in and debunk stereotypes, which is exactly what I wanted to do in my
blog called Bursting the Vandy Bubble, in which I would take a stereotype and
break it down by interviewing someone I wouldn’t normally meet. In other words,
I picked my own Breakfast Club. I have always loved digging deeper into
someone’s life story, figuring out what they are all about, pulling a John
Hughes on them, if you will. Like the
categorized 80s high schoolers, I selected a few millenial stereotypes that are
doled out at my own school, Vanderbilt University: the socialite, the student
government representative, the athlete, the actor and the inner city girl. In
interviewing my peers, by having a Breakfast
Club kind of moment with them, I would discover that they were more than
just the stereotype that had been prescribed to them the modern Mr. Vernon’s.
I could
have described these individuals that I interviewed in the “simplest terms, the
most convenient definitions”, but I knew that would just add to the insufficient
body of evidence attempting to describe my generation. As a senior on the verge
of entering the real world, I wanted to know more about these people who were coming of age with me. At Vanderbilt, the phrase “the Vandy bubble” describes the tendency
to ignore life outside of our socially and somewhat physically restricted
campus, but I think I put myself in somewhat of a personal Vandy bubble too by
not stretching my social circles to those unlike me. Through my interviews with
my selected modern day Breakfast Clubbers, I wanted to burst the bubble on my
generation and my school – and as it turns out, myself.
#privateuniversity |
But why,
you ask, would a bubble need to be burst in the first place? Well, the Mr.
Vernon’s today come in the form of fellow millenials, businesses and bloggers
who all aim to one-size-fits-all-icize millenials.
Unlike
yours truly, some millenials embrace the stereotypes and build them up: blogs
like Betches
Love This and Bro Bible take the “mean girl” and the “asshole dude”
characters to a ridiculous albeit comical level. They tread the fine line
between the comical self-awareness of the characters they’ve embodied (the Head
Betches who write about all things betchy and the bros who cover life, girls,
sports and college) and perpetuating negative stereotypes.
Perhaps some marketing schemers think that all millenials fall into these easy categories perpetuated by betches and bros; therefore marketing to these stereotypes must be as easy as coming up with a few choice adjectives to explain an entire generation. According to millennialmarketing.com, “To Engage Millennials, Be Meaningful, Quick, and Shiny!” Um, what?
(Thanks, Millenial Marketing. Maybe I’ll
download your eBook; I hope it includes a chapter on glitter, sparkles and
lamé. Lord knows that’s what the kids want these days.)
Howard Fineman isn’t much better at lending a sense of
individualism to the millenial generation. In his commencement address to
Colgate’s class of 2011, he didn’t highlight one particular stereotype, but
indicates that the thing that separates us from other generations is paramount
to anything else about us: technology.
“You have grown up in and with the digital world.
When you were in grade school, the following things did not exist, or barely
existed: iTunes, smartphones, iPads, Google, Wikipedia, Skype, eBay, Flickr,
Craigslist, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare -- in other words, your
whole existence.”
Our “whole existence,” Mr. Fineman?
Don’t get me wrong, I love technology as much as my fellow Vanderbilt Breakfast
Clubbers, but through the people that I have met in my time at Vanderbilt, and
in writing this blog, I know I have proved that we are so much more than Apple
product addicts.
Andrew Sullivan recently did a piece that is the Internet
cousin of my blog. He actually
lets millenials speak for themselves in a recent series called “Letters from Millenial Voters” in
which students and young professionals write about the reasoning behind their
political affiliation. Finally, a sense of why the millenials decided the last
election: we are not just stereotyped betches or bros, attracted to shiny
things, walking around with an iPhone glued to the palm of our hands. We are
more than statistics or survey questions, more than SAT scores and more than
the collective hours we spend on Facebook. (Without a doubt, a lot.)
I found
that sense of more in each of the
interviews that I conducted with the socialite, the student government
representative, the athlete, the actor and the inner city girl. Every single
one of them came to Vanderbilt with a different story. As we talked and I reflected on our
conversations, I could see the disintegration of the generational stereotypes
that the Mr. Vernon’s, Betches, Bros, Millenial Marketers and Howard Finemans
had assigned. Furthermore, I could see and hear the longstanding Vanderbilt
reputation being chipped away.
People
think that Vanderbilt is a school full of stuck up brats who take the
opportunity to go to a prestigious school for granted. (There are absolutely
people like that, but my issue is with the idea that the public thinks we’re all like that.) A reputation of an
institution, while sometimes valid, is often no more than a stereotype applied
to a lot of people – which is debatably worse than a stereotyping one person
because you’re implicating an entire group. Even though each of them described
the ways in which Vanderbilt does have a stereotype, the Vanderbilt Breakfast
Club agreed that the university is slowly but surely distancing itself from the
WASPy student body of yesteryear.
The
diversity of the Vanderbilt Breakfast Club made a wonderful jumping off point
for conversations, and our chats ranged from socializing to Darth Vader to
community service. We were never without something to talk about because they
all had such varied backgrounds. They hail from Orlando, FL, Geneva, OH,
Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX and South Bronx, NY, and major in a variety of studies
including Spanish, Religious Studies, Human and Organizational Development and
Public Policy. All of them have different career aspirations, from social work
to PR to entrepreneurship to international relations to simply “abundance” from
our student government rep. Different schedules, different families, different
political beliefs, different hobbies, different organizational pursuits,
different socioeconomic backgrounds. This group was a cornucopia of talents and
pursuits – and I have to think that if I had selected other students who don
stereotypical label (the frat guy, the engineering nerd, the band geek, the
hipster, the rock star, the good girl, the list goes on), I would have
encountered just as diverse perspectives and experiences.
So in
saying that “everyone” in the millenial generation is an iPhone-toting
Facebook-robot, you would be wrong. To everyone who says that “every”
Vanderbilt student is a bratty white kid with a credit card, you would be
wrong. There were definitely parts about each interviewee that fit into the
stereotype – which is why they had it in the first place. The athlete is an up
and coming SEC football star, the socialite parties at frat houses and bars,
the inner city girl comes from an urban neighborhood, the student government
guy ran for student body president and the actor is progressing into improv
comedy.
Stereotypes do come from something true but they are oversimplified.
They fall short in a number of ways, as evidenced by the bevy of individuals I
have formed relationships with through this series of interviews. The Vanderbilt Breakfast Clubbers are
real people, not just cookie cutter characteristics. Like Andrew Sullivan, the
media needs to give individuals the chance to tell their own story, because you
can’t understand what someone is all about without the chance to hear it from
their perspective. You have to spend a little time in Saturday detention before
you can form a judgment about them.
(Don’t say no to cookies, just cookie cutters.)
Ok, so for all of the griping that I’ve done about being the next John
Hughes (I wish), my own generation perpetuating our own stereotypes, other
generations stereotyping us, and stupid marketing schemes, I have to say: there
is something to be said about a generation having a common thread. It doesn’t
necessarily have to be as simple as “we are the technology generation” although
that is partly true. The Pew Research Center sums it up nicely:
We know we can never completely
disentangle the multiple reasons that generations differ. At any given moment
in time, age group differences can be the result of three overlapping
processes: 1) Life cycle effects. Young people may be different from older
people today, but they may well become more like them tomorrow, once they
themselves age. 2) Period effects. Major events (wars; social movements;
economic downturns; medical, scientific or technological breakthroughs) affect
all age groups simultaneously, but the degree of impact may differ according to
where people are located in the life cycle. 3) Cohort effects. Period events
and trends often leave a particularly deep impression on young adults because
they are still developing their core values; these imprints stay with them as
they move through their life cycle.
So the technology boom, September 11, the war on terror, the economic
downturn, President Obama’s election will all tie us together in some way, and
all of my ramblings and musings and opinions may be linked in some way to those
collective experiences. But again, I still don’t think that any one collective
experience is the defining way to link us.
It’s more the awareness that my generation has of one another and the
world. We have been called a “me” generation, like the kids growing up in the
1980s, but I would argue the opposite. Every single one of my Breakfast club –the socialite, the student government representative, the athlete, the
actor and the inner city girl – all talked about a desire to help people and
improve the communities and world around them. Despite the different ways they
wanted to do that, despite their different views of the world, they all
acknowledged a sense of humanity and their place in improving it. We’re not
living in some la-la land though: the recognition of their place in improving
the world indicates an awareness of its imperfection – and their own
imperfection at that. They all talked about faults, doubts and expressed
concern what the future might hold.
Yet in uncovering all of this, I proved that there is a heart and soul
to the individuals of my generation, and of Vanderbilt, not to be defined by
stereotypes.
The athlete is a tireless worker with
two brothers. The socialite wants to work for a non-profit college admissions
company. The inner city girl would do anything for her family. The actor spends
his spring breaks doing community service in Latin America. The student
government guy is president of the Asian American Students Club (he is decidedly
white). All of these things I would have never known about them, I now see as
part of who they are, not just who everyone thinks they are.
Furthermore, I realized that I see
myself in all of these uncovered details that I discovered when talking to
them. I am a hard working family girl who loves community service, and while
I’m not president of the Asian American Student Club, I love learning about
cultures that are not my own. Without hearing the firsthand stories of these
“stereotypes,” I never would have found out who they are – nor found out a bit
of where I fit in to this generation.
A confession: I am terrified to graduate
from college. But after slowly piecing together my blog, I slowly pieced
together my confidence. I now realize that individuals
of my generation who are so different than me have the same awareness of the
world around them. I am scared to leave Vanderbilt, but knowing that I have the
ability to form opinions about people after I get to know them is heartening. I
don’t feel that sense of foreboding separation as much as I once did, because I
know that if I just sit down and ask someone about themselves, there will be
more than likely something that connects us because we care about our peers,
our community and our world.
Dear
Mr. Vernons of 2012,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice our identities for whatever it is we did wrong, but we think you're crazy for stereotyping millenials and trying to write essays about who you think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out, is that each one of us is a socialite,
and a student government rep,
and an athlete,
an actor,
and an inner city girl.
Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours,
The Vanderbilt Breakfast Club.
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice our identities for whatever it is we did wrong, but we think you're crazy for stereotyping millenials and trying to write essays about who you think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out, is that each one of us is a socialite,
and a student government rep,
and an athlete,
an actor,
and an inner city girl.
Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours,
The Vanderbilt Breakfast Club.