How to Fight Ageism, Ageist Harm and Health Discrimination, Aging While Black: NPR
'How to fight ageism in the world around you — and in yourself,' NPR, Dec. 28, 2024. Edit.
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Leanne Clark-Shirley has always loved to dance. She goes to nightclubs near her home in Durham, North Carolina, on a regular basis. But in recent years she's detected a change in how she's treated. "There is a sense that I don't belong there sometimes," she says. "I work through it and I go anyway, but I'm noticing that change." Clark-Shirley is 45. She says she and her husband are just about the only people there in her age group. She says other club–goers often push her aside or stand in front of her as if she wasn't there. "I feel entirely invisible," she says.
Clark-Shirley is president and CEO of the American Society on Aging, so she knows a thing or two about ageism. Ageism — discrimination and prejudice based on someone's age — is so ingrained in society that most of us don't notice it.
Yet "we all face the consequences and we all have a role in fixing it," Clark-Shirley says. Experts say that fighting ageism isn't only important to create an equitable and fair society, it also helps all of us live longer, healthier — even more fulfilling — lives. Yale professor Becca Levy studies the psychology of aging. Her research found that people who had positive beliefs about aging bounced back more effectively from illnesses and other setbacks than those who had negative perceptions about what it meant to be older.
The positive people even lived an average of 7 1/2 years longer than those who thought aging was a bummer.
Pushing back against assumptions. Fighting ageism today is an uphill battle, Clark-Shirley and other experts say. We are steeped in a culture of youth, with a global anti-aging products industry worth billions of dollars, and even women in their twenties using Botox. Still, despite all this, social gerontologist Jeanette Leardi says, "We are coming to a tipping point," in how Americans view older age. Leardi, the author of the book Aging Sideways: Changing Our Perspectives on Getting Older, says a growing number of people like her are not content to be portrayed as grumpy and creaky, or any other stereotype of an older person.
When there's offensive content, she and others will call out companies on social media and write to them to educate them. Leardi, who is 72 and has gray hair, has noticed that when she's waiting for service at a store, a younger person will often be attended to first. "The way to handle that is to be assertive," she says. "So I go up to the sales clerk and say, 'I've been here for a while, can you serve me? I need to get on with my day.' "She also resists what she calls benevolent ageism, where a clerk will call her "young lady" when she clearly isn't. "They're trying to make you feel better.. Raymond Jetson is the founder of Aging While Black, a movement to improve the aging experience of Black Americans... Read More,
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/12/28/nx-s1-5234649/ageism-ageist-harm-health-discrimination