The Inevitable Conclusion
White millennials, economic collapse, and becoming the them
Good afternoon, my fellow Defiants!
Today’s piece goes against my newly self-proclaimed publishing cadence, but I felt extremely called to address it.
I awoke to this post and it has stayed with me all morning. The responses are enlightening, and as I allowed it to swirl around my cavernous head, all my reasoning boiled down to one answer. I write this both as a white millennial and as an American by naturalization, which I have convinced myself provides a level of objectivity perhaps those born and raised here can’t access.
Why are white millennials less bigoted than the generations of white people before and after them?
The answer to the latter part is simple: the generations after us have been raised on hateful and bigoted MAGA drivel, on the era of every balding bro with access to a mic feeling entitled to his own podcast, and the proliferation of far-right social media. Brainwashed, essentially.
The answer to the first part is no less simple. Follow along, dear one, point by point, until we arrive at the inevitable conclusion.
(White) millennials were born into Reaganomics. Trickle-down economics is the ultimate, abysmal transfer of wealth from the middle class to the one percent, and every Republican who has existed since Ronald Reagan has found it within their cold dead heart to lie about its effectiveness - mainly because their ability to trade stocks while accessing sensitive policy information allows them to become the one percent.
While the bile of trickle-down economics was still making its way through the system, we saw our parents benefit from previous policies: higher marginal tax rates on corporations and the ultra-wealthy propping up the middle class. We watched, and now know we will never benefit ourselves. We saw our parents support families - often on one salary - purchase single-family homes, maybe a summer house! We were told all the riches of this great nation were owed to us, too. We were sold a dream that no longer exists.
We grew up as immigration was expanding across cultures, as the wave of immigrants who arrived in the 1970s began to bear children. We went to school with them. We were friends with them. We visited their homes after school and on weekends and saw how they lived, and we weren’t scared of them. We were exposed to all cultures and ways of living and walks of life from childhood, and we welcomed the different experiences.
We came of age while the internet was mostly true and informative, when interactions were more connective. There were barriers to entry and not everyone’s opinion mattered. The way god intended it. The internet was a world of research and news and buying books before Amazon learned how to put Mom and Pop stores out of business. Early social media was friending your existing friends and sharing blurry photo albums - not AI slop and 90% self-help and predatory marketing. We thriv, blissfully unaware what an algorithm was. We barely had cell phones, and if we did, we used them to call our parents and play Snake. Other than that, we played outside, touched grass, got dirty, and came home for dinner when the porch light lit up.
We finished high school around 9/11. The event itself was heartbreaking and formative and traumatizing. What followed was worse. We watched the reactive atrocities committed by a generation with a narrow worldview we knew we had already outgrown. Our president fibbed incessantly about Weapons of Mass Destruction, dragged us into racist Forever Wars, convinced us of American Exceptionalism, and left behind an country more divided. We enjoyed a childhood rushing through the airport to meet returning loved ones at the gate, and emerged as adults being forced to have our breasts fondled by security as we stood shoeless and beltless on our way to spend the weekend in Vegas - which we paid for on credit as the cost of living exploded around us.
Our elders convinced us college was the way as the cost of it simultaneously skyrocketed. We expanded our worldviews and became educated (and education is the ultimate cure for bigotry), then graduated with tens - or even hundreds - of thousands in debt, marching headfirst into the Global Financial Crisis. We couldn’t get the jobs our crippling college debt had promised us. Banks were being bailed out instead of people. The wage gap widened significantly. Entry-level salaries collapsed along with the housing market.
We watched the most egregiously racist response to America’s first Black president, followed by the most egregiously pathetic response to America’s most racist and unqualified president. This is its own essay and is still unfurling its horrid, poisonous tentacles as we gather here together. This is THE battle we know we will spend the rest of our lives fighting. This is THE battle we know we may never see the end of.
Post-GFC, us battle-scarred white millennials finally started feeling some hard-earned econonmic relief. For the first time, we began to experience a glimmer of career progression and financial stability - only to be hogtied and marched headfirst into COVID, devouring everything we had worked for once again. On the other side of the most earth-shattering collapse of our time, our jobs were sold out from under us and proudly handed to AI and automation as entire industries collapsed. Hey - at least the one percent and megalomaniacal tech bros feast on caviar and champagne while we eat cake.
White millennials spent the decade we were coming into our own as adults being diabolically gaslit by MAGA. The same corporations who found it deep within themselves to fund this monstrosity of corruption are also actively suppressing our wages, while demanding we be more grateful as they cement a dysoptian technocracy. Multi-billion-dollar conglomerates are union-busting, downsizing, implementing tariffs, and scoffing at those of us who dare question them.
Republican-foisted rugged individualism has denied us community and called us weak for seeking it. We are exhausted. We are disconnected from each other. Those in power tell us our empathy will lead to the downfall of Western civilization, all while controlling and monetizing those with political power to ensure we stay in our place. We can’t afford homes. We can’t afford children. And while we grapple and beg for basic policy change aligned with the rest of the developed world, we are told to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps as end-stage capitalism continuously backs its rapidly disintegrating Cyber Truck over us and calls us pathetic and ungrateful, while it sucks up all our natural resources, poisons our lands absolves itself of responsibility.
So, here we are. The inevitable conclusion. The final destination. The one reason that ties all the others together. If I had but ten seconds to definitively answer the initial question, this is how I would summarize all the utter bullshit we have weathered into one point:
Why are white millennials less bigoted than the generations that have come before us?
Simple:
American society has always been us vs. them. Historically, it has been patriots vs. traitors. The Union vs. the Confederacy. White America vs. anyone with a little extra melanin.
Starting with the unmitigated and absolutely fucking foreseeable disaster that is Reaganomics, white millennials are the first generation of milky Americans who have not disproportionately benefited from rigged economic and social policy.
We have become the first generation of white Americans to be othered. To be themmed. We are more progressive because we are experiencing but a fraction of the themness minorities have always faced - and we don’t like it.
How sad that to experience it is what it took to temper us.
How fucking sad.
Thank you for reading this with me. For sitting with the discomfort. For letting the truth settle where it needs to.
I don’t have all the answers, just the ones I’ve earned through living this timeline alongside you. If this sparked something, if you see it differently, if you have your own piece of this puzzle, I want to hear it. We’re building understanding together, one honest conversation at a time.
What’s your take? Drop it in the comments. Let’s keep talking.
Claire
xo