Siva’s essay, “Generational Myth,” contains so many pertinent truths and warnings that it ought to be distributed to every journalist with a story due on “kids today.” To lump the young under the heading “Digital Generation” is to obscure differences in wealth, access, experience, schooling, etc., differences that induce vast discrepancies in digital activity and know-how. The very notion of “generations,” he argues, serves more to score polemical points and indulge nostalgia (or resentment) than to describe real people in real settings. Siva concludes, “Americans love generations because they keep us from examining uncomfortable ethnic, gender, and class distinctions.”

It’s a strong piece, but that last point goes too far. In sum, Siva leaps from arguing the bogus nature of generational thinking to imputing a repressive motive to it. The evidence he supplies—that is, the most adept digital youth, who acquire representative status, tend to be white, male, and affluent—has important social implications, but it doesn’t support an avoidance thesis. Or rather, if there is an avoidance factor, we can limit its application, for in my experience it applies more to people in academia than to Americans in general.

Race, in particular, remains a delicate subject, as the episodes in the Obama campaign have revealed. But I have never understood the trepidation with which higher-ed folks broach it. In my own work, apart from spending four years researching and writing a book on a horrible episode of racial violence and sexual hysteria in U.S. history, I have cited grievous racial and gender gaps in academic achievement, leisure habits, and home life—for instance, TV time across races—and I’ve brought them up in conversation without anxiety. And yet, at their mention the faces of professors go blank. It’s as if a warning signal went off inside their heads and chimed, “Say nothing—show nothing.”

I don’t see the same caution and wariness in other groups of people, and I don’t see “generationists” as out to paper over ethnic, gender, and class distinctions. And let’s remember that the most influential “generation statement” came precisely out of a concern for those troubling racial, sexual, and class aspects of U.S. society. It’s the Port Huron Statement, which announced at the start, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” and continued, “Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living.”

No, generational groupings serve different and heterogeneous purposes. They are a way of describing social phenomena, of claiming an identity, of defining a point in the course of civilizations, of freezing historical change, of remembering a lost youth or regretting a coming maturity, and so on. Sometimes they reveal and sometimes they conceal, and Siva is right to demand finer distinctions.

But ever since 1962, the generation label has touched a cultural chord, and Pete Townsend, Pepsi, Douglas Coupland, and Brokaw recognized it. Let’s not allow excesses and oversimplifications to rule it out entirely.