Actually, The Gen Z Stare Is A Wealthy, White Privilege

In the last week, I have watched irreverent TikToks, read impassioned think pieces and waded through arguments on Reddit about the one trend that holds the holy title of fad du jour: the sanctimonious Gen Z stare. If you have blissfully skipped past this clickbait cycle (how?!), let me illustrate.

Older millennials and boomers are revelling in a shared observation: if they attempt small talk with their Gen Z coworkers, they are often met with a vacant, unblinking, frozen stare. 

As discourse caught on, people confessed to having similar experiences with digital natives in informal settings like grocery stores, fast food restaurants or even in the neighbourhood walkway.

“They look at you like they just saw a ghost,” one TikToker said while others are comparing the Gen Z stare to young people scrambling for a response or buffering in real time. With the hashtag racking up thousands of posts online, academics and psychologists also began weighing in and – surprise, surprise – after much analysis, the trend was whittled down to the pandemic. 

Born between 1997 and 2012, a meaty chunk of Gen Z experienced pivotal, transitional years of high school, university and first jobs behind screens on Zoom.

This coupled with long hours on the internet, the dissolution of third spaces and the lack of IRL interaction has seemingly left us with embarrassingly poor social skills. Hence, if someone catches us off guard with a “hey, how are you?”, we stare back in confusion while debating fright or flight. 

However, as a Gen Z culture writer who is usually more than willing to jump on the bandwagon and stratify a micro behaviour as a macro trend, I cannot connect the dots and relate to the Gen Z stare.

Just as the memo prescribes, I finished college weeks before the pandemic hit, started my first job deep into the lockdown and even moved from India to the UK while social restrictions were still being enforced. Still I can say for certain that I have never given anyone the confused, deer caught in the headlights gaze that is supposedly typical of young people. 

After deep thought, I was confronted with the painful realisation that this is probably because I am a Brown woman, and until recently, was an immigrant in the UK. What is the connection you may think? Well, when I first moved to London, the chatty Tesco staff would greet me with a classic “You all right?”.

The phrase is interchangeable with “hello” for Brits but implies an actual concern for your wellbeing in India and so I was understandably shook. Despite the confusion, I played or rather performed along, grinning, greeting, leaning in to ease the people around me, only to frantically ask Google what that means on my bus ride home. 

The truth is, being an immigrant and a person of colour in a predominantly White space already places you in the radar. Here, blankness becomes a luxury you just can’t afford.

If I stare back vacantly, people may not credit that to generational malaise. It would swiftly become a question of social integration, a neon highlighter on my foreignness and my inability to fit in. Maybe she doesn’t speak English (an insurmountable faux pas), maybe there’s something wrong with her, maybe we should keep our distance. The Gen Z stare then becomes just another reason to be grouped as the other. 

Sadia Ahmed, a Manchester-based student working part time at a coffee shop, echoes my experience.

“I’ve gotten accustomed to people of all ages struggling to understand my Bangladeshi accent now and again, so I get my fair share of confused looks,” she says. “But I try my darnedest to smile my way through service because if I give the Gen Z stare it will become a statement of my entire community. We’ll hear a group of right wingers say hijabis don’t have manners and I just can’t afford that, you know.”

Despite being strangers in big, bold cities, as immigrants we often go the extra mile to be socialised, to swim with the existing cultural rhythm and to exist without any friction. 

PhD candidate, podcast host and Substacker Maalvika Bhat also believes every vacant look is a potential misunderstanding or a possible gateway to being labelled as threatening.

“This connects to Sara Ahmed’s work on ‘wilful subjects’. [She explores] how people of colour, especially women, are expected to be grateful and accommodating, and how any deviation from this expectation is read as aggression or ingratitude. In this context, the Gen Z stare becomes, for us, a form of wilfulness we just cannot afford,” she explains. “It requires the privilege of being able to disappear into your own indifference. For those of us who are already hypervisible, already marked as different, such disappearance isn’t just impossible – it’s dangerous.”

Now if you scroll on TikTok and catch people of colour admitting to the Gen Z stare, don’t hold up that video as proof and decry this experience. Racial privilege just like all other enablers is acutely intersectional.

A wealthy Brown woman born in London with a British accent may have a very different experience to an immigrant, she may even be primed to fit in better than a middle class Londoner who is White. Gender, class, race and countless other social factors influence how we accept and utilise our privilege. In all honesty, my ability to do the extra leg work, gather cultural capital and acclimatise myself in a foreign social environment is also seeped in a type of privilege that many may not have access to. 

But the next time a phenomenon takes over the internet, ask yourself if it is truly a generational trend (already a homogenised approach imo) or is it crafted for wealthy, White people first, and force fits everyone else as an afterthought?

As much as you may think this is an anomaly, it’s actually omnipresent. When the Coastal Grandmother aesthetic took flight last year, I can say for certain my grandmother living off the coast in India never once wore J. Crew cashmere sweaters or sipped on champagne in straw hats.

The Gen Z stare is only one new-age example of a far deeper and historic social ecosystem that continues to reward Whiteness.