“No one understands old but old people.”
James made this proclamation over an ancient pool table in an impoverished neighborhood of the greater San Francisco Bay. The other men gathered at the senior center nodded in agreement. A slender African American man who grew up in segregated Georgia during the Great Depression, he elaborated for the benefit of the Gen-X sociologist by his side. As James deliberately lined up his next shot he explained: “Everything changes. Old is a different animal all together. And the only way you can understand it is you have to get there.”
I met James while researching how inequalities—based on race, socioeconomic status, and gender—that structure an American’s working years, also shape later life. (James is not his real name, in accordance with institutional review board requirements all the names in this article are pseudonyms.) I began this project because I was interested in what the lives of aging Americans could tell us about growing inequalities, and how these inequalities affect the graying U.S. population. The larger six-year project included several years of listening to, watching, and accompanying a racially diverse group of over a hundred seniors from both rich and poor neighborhoods as they went about their everyday lives. These seniors shared the unique physical, social, and psychological challenges of growing older in America's youth-focused society. Just a few weeks before James explained the experiences of growing old, I observed Lila, a white woman around the same age as James, make a similar comment to a friend over lunch in their upscale, tree-lined, and predominantly white neighborhood. She said, “When you get old things change. How you think and feel.”
[For more of this story, written by Corey Abramson, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...ntil-the-end/389910/]
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