Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

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  Nevertheless, much has changed. Most white people no longer work and live in places where they could expect not to interact with those of other races. Now workplaces, neighborhoods, and even many marriages are integrated. Eighty-seven percent of high school students in 2012 said they had a close friend of another race, up from 61% in the late 1970s. Twice as many say they “do things (like having a conversation, eating together, playing sports)” with those of other races “a lot” (47%, compared to 19% in the late 1970s). Only a third as many now live in a neighborhood that’s exclusively one race (54% did in the late 1970s, versus only 18% in 2012). “All of my friends are a different race than I am,” says Maria, 20. “It was never looked down upon to have friends that were not the same skin color as you. We are a generation more accepting of diversity.”

  Some of this is simple demographics: among Americans born between 1977 and 1994, only 62% are white (compared to 75% of Baby Boomers and 85% of the World War II generation). GenMe is more comfortable with racial crossovers, in everything from dating to music. One of my students was a Filipino young man who lived, breathed, and ate hip-hop music; he proudly pointed out that one of the best hip-hop DJs is also Filipino. But, he says, “I am proud of my culture but not ethnocentric.” He’s not alone. More and more young whites and Asians enjoy rap music and watch black comedians. It’s pretty much taken for granted that black people, their culture, and their music are cool. And so is Hispanic and Asian culture—it’s a small sign of progress, surely, but who can get through the week without eating tacos, sushi, or Chinese takeout?

  Many of the questions about race in the General Social Survey, first administered in 1972, are so outdated that most of them aren’t even asked anymore. In 1972, 32% still favored laws that prevented people of different races from marrying one another. By the time the GSS stopped asking the question in 2002, only 3% agreed. Other questions ask if black and white children should go to the same school, a nonissue by 1985, when the question was dropped. Another item asks if one would vote for a black president—an unnecessary question after more than half the country did so in 2008 and 2012.

  So have the changes in race relations over the last four decades had psychological effects? Back in the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark performed a famous experiment in which they gave black children the choice of playing with white dolls or black dolls. Most of the black children chose to play with the white dolls, leading the authors to conclude that the black children had low self-esteem. In its Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregation, the Supreme Court mentioned these results as an example of the inferiority felt by black children.

  So do blacks and other minorities have lower self-esteem than whites, and has this difference changed over the generations? To find out, Jennifer Crocker and I gathered data from 712 samples of 375,254 people of all races and ethnicities who filled out self-esteem questionnaires between the 1950s and the 1990s.

  In the 1960s and early 1970s, black and white Americans scored about the same on measures of self-esteem. During the 1980s, however, black Americans’ self-esteem increased until it was noticeably higher than whites’. By the 1990s, 58% of blacks, and 61% of black college students, displayed above-average self-esteem. This is surprising given the usual belief that ethnic minorities will have lower self-esteem; clearly, young black Americans feel good about themselves. In fact, blacks’ self-esteem is higher than that of any other racial or ethnic group.

  The change over the decades also tells an intriguing historical story: the civil rights movement and the general shift toward racial equality has had a striking effect on the self-esteem of minority youth. Black GenMe kids grew up hearing that Black Is Beautiful, seeing people who looked like them play doctors and lawyers on TV, and (particularly if they were middle-class) expecting to go to college—why shouldn’t they feel good about themselves?

  Some of the increase in blacks’ self-esteem might be traced to school programs. Similar to the general self-esteem programs mentioned in chapter 2, many school districts have specific programs aimed at minority youth. Sondra, 20, participated in one of these programs when she was in the fifth grade. The school’s small number of black children were brought together in a group, where they learned about their culture and were taught to take pride in their background. “We were really proud of who we were and where we came from,” says Sondra. “The pride I received by being a part of this group has allowed me to know exactly who I am today and what I want to become in the future.” These groups have become even more common in recent years.

  A glance at any recent high school history textbook shows that this ethnic pride is fostered even in schools without specific programs. When the Boomers were growing up, history textbooks were basically the history of white men and discussed slavery for its political implications rather than for its effect on African Americans. Native Americans were portrayed as enemies. Now history texts are careful to emphasize the victimization of Africans and Native Americans and vividly describe their cultures. Ethnic minority youth see their history taught in school and come to understand more about their cultures and their origins.

  This trend is not limited to black youth. In our comprehensive study, we found that Hispanic and Asian young people’s self-esteem has also increased relative to whites’. Though both groups still score lower than whites on measures of self-esteem, this gap has narrowed over the last three decades. It will most likely continue to narrow as younger generations are increasingly indoctrinated into the American ideal of high self-esteem.

  Many Asian and Hispanic children of immigrants walk a delicate line between their parents’ communal culture and the individualistic ethos of the United States. On a segment of MTV’s My Life (Translated), Korean American reporter SuChin Pak talked about immigrant children’s college experiences. When SuChin went off to Berkeley, her parents moved in next door to her dorm! “Like every good Korean daughter, I always did exactly what my parents told me to do,” she says. SuChin then interviewed Sonia, a 19-year-old Mexican American struggling to study for her college classes because her parents expect her to cook, clean, and take care of her younger siblings. (“What have you ironed for me?” her father asks her.) Sonia thinks about dropping out of college, but decides to stay in school when her parents say they will support her and that they want her to “become somebody.”

  Many young Hispanics take pride in their ethnic identity and fully recognize that their generation has opportunities that their parents never dreamed of. Twenty-four-year-old Jose says that his mother attended school in Mexico only until the third grade. She worked as a maid and as a seamstress at a sweatshop after arriving in the United States when she was 13. When Jose finished high school, he says, he was “indifferent” about college, since he had already completed more schooling than anyone else in his family. Yet when his college acceptance letter came, “I read the first sentence and started to cry. I wanted to thank God for giving me so much. I told my mother this was just a start and that I would do everything possible to be the best man I could be.” Laura, 22, grew up in a poor Hispanic family in Miami and got a scholarship to a prestigious private college in the Northeast. Though fitting in at the college was difficult, she was empowered by the experience. “Being from a different generation has given me the opportunity to be educated, to take opportunities and make great things out of them,” she says. “I have come to see myself as a role model for future generations.”

  Some young people find that even experiences with ignorance or prejudice can heighten their ethnic pride. Rosa, 21, is Cuban American and grew up in Miami. When she moved to northern Florida for college, she was shocked when people came up to her and said things like “What are you? Are you Mexican?” She finally realized that many of these students, as she put it, “came from places where the closest thing to Spanish heritage was the Taco Bell on the corner.” She says this helped her focus more on her identity. “I had never felt so Cuban in my whole life!
It really became a huge part of how I saw myself, and I started to appreciate every part of my culture—the food, the music, and even the language.”

  These stories clearly show one of the upsides of individualism: young people who appreciate their culture and can take advantage of opportunities their parents never had. Although economic pressures still limit the goals of many minority youth, their race or ethnicity is no longer an automatic disqualification.

  But is the upswing in minority kids’ self-esteem an unmitigated good? As I argued in chapter 2, maybe not. It’s certainly good for young people to take pride in their ethnic identity, no matter what their background; feeling comfortable in your own skin is obviously important. But like the general self-esteem programs, ethnic self-esteem programs often take things too far and focus on the wrong causes. Raising children’s self-esteem is not going to solve the problems of poverty and crime. It doesn’t do much good for a child to have high self-esteem if his grades are poor, he gets in trouble in class, and he has no concrete plan for the future. Ethnic differences are a prime example of the disconnect between self-esteem and achievement. For example, Asian American kids have the lowest self-esteem of all ethnic groups, but, on average, they achieve the most academically. Black youngsters have the highest self-esteem, yet lag behind in academic achievement. Because self-esteem does not cause school achievement, self-esteem programs are once again putting the cart before the horse. The time spent on self-esteem programs—for children of any background—is probably better spent on teaching academics and self-control.

  CHANGES FOR WOMEN

  One of the biggest sporting events of 1973 was the tennis match between Billie Jean King, then 29, and Bobby Riggs, 54. Hyped as the “Battle of the Sexes,” the match inspired countless watercooler bets. While today few would bet on the aging player, at that time many people believed that a woman could never beat a man in sports, no matter what his age or her skill. When King arrived on the court, Howard Cosell commented on her hairstyle, saying she could be a Hollywood actress if only her hair were longer. Not surprisingly, Cosell was virtually speechless when King won—and won easily.

  Sexist attitudes and discrimination against women went far beyond sports. Before the late 1960s, medical schools systematically capped the enrollment of women at 5% of each class, regardless of how many talented women applied. When former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor graduated near the top of her Stanford Law School class in 1952, no law firm would hire her—although one firm offered her a position as a secretary. As late as the 1970s, there were no female news anchors, few female lawyers, and even fewer women scientists. The New York Times and other newspapers ran want ads under “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female.” In 1964, Virginia congressman Howard Smith, a staunch opponent of civil rights for blacks, added sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act as a joke, in hopes of defeating the bill. In his speech, he quoted a sarcastic letter from a woman complaining about “sex discrimination” in the shortage of husbands, as the House of Representatives roared with laughter. The bill passed anyway, sex discrimination clause intact. I have always imagined Congressman Smith kicking himself well into the next decade.

  Women now earn the majority of college degrees, and almost half of all medical and law degrees.

  If Smith were alive today, he would be flabbergasted by what he would see. Girls play soccer alongside boys. Women earn 57% of college degrees and almost half of degrees in law and medicine. Television news is filled with female reporters and anchors, sometimes reporting on the actions of the many women now in government leadership positions (including eighty-three in Congress, an all-time high). Most women in their 20s have never been married, and in 2005—for the first time in American history—more women (51%) lived without a spouse than with one. More than six times as many women had their first child after the age of 30 in 2012 compared to 1970. As of 2009, only 18% of married couples had the husband as the single breadwinner. Women are now the majority of accountants, financial managers, medical scientists, and pharmacists. All of this seems normal to us, but it would have been shocking just a few decades ago. When my mother graduated as valedictorian of her high school class in 1962, she was told that women could be nurses, teachers, or secretaries—that was it. Like most women of my generation, I was told that I could be whatever I wanted to be, and GenMe has heard the same.

  Changes in Attitudes

  Think about these questions for a minute: Should men and women share housework equally? Should women participate in the professions and in business? Should boys be given more encouragement to go to college than girls? These items appeared on a questionnaire called the Attitudes toward Women Scale. As you can probably tell right away, it was written in the early 1970s, and I was convinced that it would show a large generational change, partly because my answers to those three questions, and those of everyone I knew, were “Definitely,” “Definitely,” and “No! Are you kidding?”

  So I spent the summer of 1995, when I was 23, gathering data on 71 samples of 19,101 college students who had filled out this questionnaire between 1970 and 1995. Though I was sure I’d find change in this scale, I wasn’t certain what the pattern would look like—after all, weren’t the 1980s a more conservative decade than the 1970s? In 1991, Susan Faludi had argued that a backlash against feminism occurred during the decade of Reagan and the Moral Majority. So would attitudes toward women slide backward during the 1980s?

  Nope. Attitudes about women’s roles continued to become more egalitarian throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Although Faludi was right that the media in the 1980s were not profeminist, young people seemed to ignore this. The change over the three decades was also substantial. The average 1990s college woman had more feminist attitudes than 87% of her counterparts in the early 1970s, and the average 1990s college man had more feminist attitudes than 82% of early 1970s college men. What was once the province of hippies and radicals had become mainstream. At least the attitudes had, even if the labels hadn’t. As Paula Kamen found in her 1991 book, Feminist Fatale, young women believed in feminist values but rejected the label feminist (prompting the frequent statement “I’m not a feminist, but . . . ,” after which the young woman makes a strong statement about equality between the sexes).

  So why was there a media obsession with tearing down feminism and unearthing day-care abuse scandals (almost all later proved to be untrue) during the 1980s? Probably because the country was reeling from the breakneck pace of cultural change. In 1984, for the first time, the majority of married women with children under six were in the workplace. At college graduation ceremonies in 1982, American women earned more undergraduate degrees than men for the first time in history.

  Many GenX babies weren’t even born when these changes got under way in the 1970s and 1980s. So, as always, GenX entered a world where things had already changed, and they soaked it up like little sponges. Even in my conservative Texas town, a favorite school film in the early 1980s was Free to Be . . . You and Me, an anthology of songs and stories designed to fight sexism (my personal favorites: “William Has a Doll” and the one where the prissy girl who always says “Ladies first” gets her way—she gets eaten by the tiger first!). We would sit entranced in the dark room as the puppet babies discussed which of them was a girl or a boy and the cheerful theme song began, about a place where the children are free and “every boy grows to be his own man . . . every girl grows to be her own woman.”

  GenMe didn’t even need a film to tell them this stuff. Equality between the sexes is such a given that Anne, 16, says that in her neighborhood “being a feminist is considered almost nitpicky and trivial.” Heather, 19, agrees, “Girls of my generation take everything for granted. We grew up with the understanding that girls were equal to guys. I think of it as something that should come naturally, not as a privilege.”

  Kristin Donnelly and I decided to find out if this was true—did attitudes toward women’s roles continue to become more progress
ive since the 1990s, or has there instead been a backlash? The data show continued acceptance of broader roles for women in the transition from GenX to GenMe. Among high school students in 2012, 69% believed working mothers could establish just as warm a relationship with their children, up from 53% in the late 1970s and 63% in 1990–91. Only 20% thought a preschool child would suffer if his/her mother worked, down from 59% in the 1970s and 42% in the early 1990s. This might have occurred because twice as many of GenMe’s own mothers worked for most of their childhoods (67% in 2012, up from 31% in the late 1970s).

  Even the pronouns we see are different now. Using the Google Books database of 5 million books, my coauthors and I discovered a profound shift toward gender equality in language. In the early 1970s, books used 4.5 times as many male pronouns (he, him) as female pronouns (she, her). By 2008, this shrunk to 1.75 male pronouns for each female pronoun—not equality, but a lot closer than before.

  Many young women recognize those who fought for women’s rights—including their mothers. Erin, 20, says, “My mother was a housewife. She urged me to break the tradition of women sacrificing their identities and their opportunities to be a mother. Women are finally starting to emerge from their domestic quarantine, and I am proud to be a part of a new generation of women who won’t stand for it any longer, and grateful to my forerunners who made it possible.” Erin is not the only one unwilling to enter the “domestic quarantine.” In 2012, only 1 out of 1,000 incoming college students chose “homemaker (full-time)” as their expected career. This suggests that either fewer and fewer women will stay home with their children, or more and more women—or men—will end up with a role they never expected to have.