Whose Generation Is Kamala's Anyway?

The true identity question

Donald Trump and his MAGA cult spent last week questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Even Byron Donalds, who’s Black and has biracial children, repeated Trump's slur on ABC’s This Week before host George Stephanapolous mopped the floor with him. Now, Harris’s generational identity has become a subject of debate. A Daily Mail headline from last weekend declared: “OK Boomer! How Kamala Harris, 59, desperately wants to identify with Gen Z and the youth despite being three decades older.”

Political reporter Charlie Spiering writes, “Harris, 59, is officially in the 'Baby Boomer' generation, even though she's trying to mask her age and fit in with younger generations, including Gen Zers born after 1997.” He quotes Washingtonian journalist Andrew Beaujon, who wrote in 2020, “Sorry, she’s a boomer. Rules are rules, slackers.”

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Not Breaking News: Kamala Harris Is Black. Donald Trump Is Racist.

Similar to the MAGA narrative about Harris’s race, the implication is that Harris is pretending she’s young and hip in a desperate “How do you do, fellow kids!” play for the youth vote. The obvious problem here is that my fellow Gen Xers aren’t as young as we were when Alanis Morissette topped the charts. That’s not ironic. It’s just the inexorable passage of time. Harris turns 60 in October, so she’s about the same age Hillary Clinton was during the 2008 Democratic primary. No one considered her the “youth” candidate. That was 46-year-old Barack Obama.

Compared to President Joe Biden and convicted felon Donald Trump, Harris obviously seems like an ovum, but she’s one of the oldest Democratic presidential nominees in history. FDR was only older than Harris is now when he ran for his fourth and final term. Harry Truman was 64 during the 1948 election. John Kerry was still 60 on Election Day 2004.

Harris has a youthful energy and dynamic nature that appeals to the kids. It’s also why Gen Xers want to claim her, even if many of us have already started complaining about driving after dark. She’s a far better credit to our beleaguered generation than Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Nikki Haley. Just check her out dancing to Q-Tip’s “Vivrant Thing” at her house party celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary.

Generation labels are meaningless

When journalist Andrew Beaujon defined Harris as a boomer with a snarky “rules are rules, slackers,” he was what social scientists would call “talking out of his ass.” According to Time magazine, Gen-X is only “roughly” defined as anyone born between 1965 and 1980. Other researchers put the range between 1965 and 1984. Still, if taken absolutely literally, that would mean Harris somehow belongs to an entirely different generation than people born just a few months later but were still in the same graduating class. However, researchers William Strauss and Neil Howe place the Gen X birth years from 1961 to 1981, which would include Harris, the Obamas, and Britney Spears.

Gen Xers were once known as the “MTV Generation” (MTV was a cable channel that showed music videos). That seems more applicable to people born during the 1970s who would’ve watched MTV during their adolescence. (My family didn’t have cable until 1990, and I still fondly recall summer vacation trips when we stayed at hotels that had MTV.) Maybe Harris caught the “Thriller” video in her college dorm, but that’s not quite the same.

I’ve seen it argued that generation boundaries should include the people who helped define the generation: So Michael J. Fox, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, most of the Brat Pack, and Eddie Vedder are automatically Gen-X. I don’t entirely buy this because The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Bob Dylan arguably helped define the Baby Boom generation, and those artists were all born prior to 1946. I admit it does seem weird to imagine that two members of the Friends cast (Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow) are boomers.

I should probably confess my own bias at this point: I think most generation labels are rubbish. Lately, they’ve become a sociological grouping that reflects a shared cultural upbringing. For instance, Baby Boomers were once defined strictly as the children born right after World War II — a historical marker with an objective impact on why so many babies were booming. Whereas, some academics define Gen Xers as the kids who were born after JFK was assassinated and lived through post-Watergate cynicism and Reagan-era consumerism. This is all relevant to our backgrounds — perhaps it’s why we liked Nirvana — but it doesn’t explain why we exist.

Philip N. Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, argued in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed that generation labels have no basis in social reality. He points out the absurdity of suggesting that “the tennis champion Williams sisters are a generation apart, according to the Pew Research Center. Venus, born 1980, is part of ‘Gen X’; Serena, born 1981, is a ‘Millennial.’ Meanwhile, Donald Trump and Michelle Obama are both in the same generation. The former was born in 1946 while the latter was born in 1964, making them both ‘baby boomers.’” (I’m surprised Gen Xers didn’t fight harder for Michelle.)

Generations labels and descriptors are often used by the current generation in power to casually sum up “kids today.” Millennials were shorthand for youth culture until well after the oldest Millennial turned 40. That’s when you got the absurd term “Elder Millennial,” as if social scientists believed this generation had uniquely discovered middle age. The comedian Iliza Shlesinger has a great bit about her decrepit “Elder Millennial” state. (Watch below.)

The supposed “Elder Millennials” graduated high school before 9/11 when the average unemployment rate was relatively low. That’s a very different life experience from the Millennials who graduated during or just after the Great Recession when unemployment rates hovered above 11 percent.

American cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell came up with the term “Generation Jones” in 1999, when I was busy making sure my employer’s computers didn’t go Skynet on Y2K. This “micro-generation” spanned from 1954 to 1965. Most of the people born during this period didn’t have World War II veterans as parents and didn’t have to personally worry about the draft. Elder boomers had opposed and/or served in the Vietnam War, but Generation Jones lacked any defining political cause. This group did come of age when HIV/AIDs was a worldwide threat. (Trump has referred to STDs as his “personal Vietnam,” but that doesn’t make him Generation Jones, just a heartless monster.)

Generation Jones never lived in a world without television, similar to how “Generation Z” has no idea of life prior to personal computers, the internet, or cell phones. It’s unclear why Pontell called this group “Jones” — perhaps it’s a reference to “keeping up with the Joneses,” a predominant consumerist impulse during the 1980s. Patrick Bateman would’ve been a member of Generation Jones.

“Jones” is also slang for a “strong desire or attraction” to something, and people born around this time might’ve yearned for the plentiful opportunities their elder boomer siblings enjoyed.

This generation includes Annie Lennox, Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, Carrie Fisher, Prince, Allison Janey, Bono, RuPaul, Paula Abdul, and Keanu Reeves. It’s well worth keeping up with those Joneses.

I tend to think generation labels are less useful than decades of birth. Harris probably has a great deal in common with other people born in the 1960s, just as I do with people born in the 1970s.

In The Police song “Born in The ‘50s,” Sting explored the shared cultural history of people who shared his decade of birth: “My mother cried when President Kennedy died. She said it was the communists, but I knew better … Would they drop the bomb on us while we made love on the beach. We were the class they couldn’t teach.”

However, later he sings, “You don’t understand us. So don’t reprimand us. We're taking the future. We don't need no teacher.” Regardless of decade or contrived generation classification, that feels fairly universal.

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