Generationalism and Racism in Elder Care: Examining Intersecting Representations and Categorizations between Elderly Patients and Younger “Migranticized” Caregivers

This paper explores the use of the category “generation” to explain and justify racist discourses and representations in care relationships between elderly individuals and younger, migranticized, and racialized caregivers. Drawing on interviews with young caregivers as well as managers of elderly care institutions in Switzerland, we observe that age-related categorizations—such as generation—are frequently mobilized to explain why migranticized and racialized caregivers in elderly care face discrimination or racism from patients. In interviews, both managers and caregivers tend to assign patients to specific generations, aligning these with being more or less “racist.”

By analyzing how generation is used as a category of practice—sometimes referred to as generationalism in the literature, meaning the systematic appeal to the concept of generation in narrating the social and political—this article highlights the different effects of this narrative. These effects include: (1) the invisibilization of certain racist structures, which hinders the development of an appropriate institutional framework to address them; (2) the generation of reductive explanations, such as the dominant representation that “older generations” are more racist than “newer generations,” which suggests that racism might automatically decrease or disappear over time; and (3) the reinforcement of presumed “intergenerational differences” to the detriment of other forms of inequalities, which are not only obscured but also delegitimized as explanations for daily discriminations. This paper thus contributes to de-centering migration studies by bringing in a critical perspective on the use of categories of age, generation, and racism.