Opinion – I am ‘Youth’

You already know something is wrong. You have known it for a while, sitting in that unpaid internship, attending that youth forum where the minister arrived an hour late and left before the discussion ended, filling in that application for a programme designed to make you more employable in an economy that was never built to employ you.

You have sat in these rooms and felt the specific discomfort of someone who suspects they are being managed rather than developed. That feeling is not ingratitude. It is not impatience. It is political intelligence. And this is about what you do with that intelligence. There is a category placed around you. It is called ‘youth’. Like all political categories, it presents itself as a neutral description: you are young; therefore, you are youth, but categories are never neutral. They sort bodies, assign them functions, and determine what claims those bodies are permitted to make on the political order and when.