Do disco elysium fans even know about W.E.B. Du Bois? Granted, it’s totally possible the writers didn’t intend on this connection, but Du Bois has such prevalence in class analysis theory and is such a founding figure of sociology that I’d be surprised if they didn't think about it at all. I’d like to think there was some idea behind Harry’s last name as a reference to him.
You probably know at least a little about Marx, or Marxism. While Marx focused on the analysis of class power, Du Bois (pronounced with the ‘s’ sound) set himself apart by exploring the intersection of class and race. He called this intersection ‘the color-line’: a metaphor representing the political/economic/social division of Black and dark-skinned people from the rest of society. He was basically the first person to look deeply at how capitalism has been used as a fundamental tool for racism.
He was the first Black person to get a PHD at Harvard; he wrote a The Souls of Black Folks—which introduced the concept of ‘double consciousness’ into sociology—as well as other pioneering works like Black Reconstruction in America and The Philadelphia Negro. His writing is both extremely impactful and impressively accessible for academia.
Anyway, yeah. If you’re interested at all in critiques of capitalism and racism, or felt like Marx had some good ideas but missed the mark in a few major places, please read Du Bois.
"you could use a bath." — racialized imagery in the outsiders
blanket warning for discussions and visual depictions of racism in this post and the context needed to explain it.
bob's "protection" of cherry is not simply him trying to "protect" his girlfriend from someone who he thinks is lower than him. his attitude pairs well with and spurred on not just by class but also by white supremacy — a very specific case of witness and class namely that he clearly believes (and cherry somewhat does too) that cherry's whiteness and womanhood is something he has to safeguard from people who are not exactly the same as him. men who are upper class, white, anglo-saxon and protestant (WASPs) in his view are the only people who matter in terms of agency and respect. white women, in this world, are not their own people but extensions of the WASP identity. cherry is someone who's his equal on that field and if cherry deviates even slightly, bob views it as a slight against himself, their class, and racial identity of the time. i have seen people cast his protection as something good or even benevolent and that in and of itself is not what's happening in canon.
white trash doesn't have the same connotations now as it did back then. it was a much worse, personalized and somewhat racialized context. a greaser is not just a class term, it is an ethnic term that basically is a broad "non-white/wasp" that his a broad category.
protecting white womanhood, protecting white purity is a huge tenent of white supremacy. it's very clear from bob and other's actions that they buy into this white supremacy but let's dig a notch further.
let's define greaser. academically.
“Greasers” and “greaseballs” likewise crossed (and were crossed by) racial and national lines. Originally a class and occupational term, greaser named those who greased sheep in preindustrial England and those who lubricated ships and railroad machinery in the nineteenth century. Both James Joyce’s Ulysses and the English translation of Emile Zola’s Nana, for example, refer to greasers working on the rails. Apologists for U.S. slavery seized on the seeming anomaly of begrimed “free” labor in criticizing the proliferation of “greasy mechanics” in the antebellum North. But the term “greaser” acquired its ongoing status as what dictionaries have called a “real Americanism” in referring to Mexicans who came to be within U.S. borders during this period as the United States annexed land. Many stories of its racialized origins preserve association with dirty, manual work. Greasing oxcart and wagon wheels and the guns of Mexican War artillerymen was “Mexican work” in Texas and California when the word gained currency. Trade in tallow, which functioned at times as a kind of currency, also was said to mark Mexican teamsters as greasers in the vocabularies of whites attacking both their greasy jobs and greasy money. [...]
In the twentieth century the terms “greaser” and “greaseball” were applied to many European immigrants, especially Italians and Greeks, as well as to Mexican Americans and to Filipinos. Indeed, the character Nick the Greek is a greaseball in the classic 1932 movie The Smart Money, while an early twentieth-century novelist could be sure his audience would understand his lampooning of grand opera as “a bunch of greasers [singing] a lot of Dago stuff.” In John Fante’s arresting novel Ask the Dust (1939), the connections between Italian American and Mexican American greasers are intricately sketched. The Italian American central character Arturo calls his Mexican American love interest a “filthy little Greaser” and then absolves himself. The slur, he reasons, came not from “my heart” but from the “quivering of an old wound.” That wound, Arturo adds, opened during his childhood in Colorado, where “Smith and Parker and Jones … hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser, and their children hurt me, just as I hurt you tonight.“ Mobsters, especially “unassimilated Sicilian” mobsters, were greasers in San Francisco in the 1930s. William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society suggests that some Italian Americans applied “greaser” to less assimilated countrymen. When Greenwich Village Irish used the epithet “greasy wops,” the supposed physical greasiness of Italians, whether of hair or face, received emphasis as it sometimes did in the slurs of the socialist writer Jack London, regarding Russian Jews. For immigrants who traded, greasy could imply being “slippery” when transacting business, a characteristic the celebrated sociologist Edward A. Ross imputed to Jews. The Dictionary of American Regional English gives “a Mexican or Mexican American” as greaser’s primary meaning and “a person of Mediterranean background” as the second meaning. For greaseball, Mediterranean origins are in the first meaning, with Mexican below. There is no doubt that greaser was a racialized “fighting word,” as C. A. Barnhart put it.
— Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, by David R. Roediger
being called that during that time was a very bad insult and one with racist connotations. as explained above, greaser applied to a large, large swath of people. it's a racialized term, and it's also why it makes sense bob skips to a bath. baths, cleaning, washing are all very racialized imagery in american history.
something i am not sure people are aware of is the imagery of soap and racism. i am going to cut this post; the images are upsetting. if you'd like an academic article to read with images, here and here.
these images circulated in the late 1800s. they would not be unfamiliar to the socs at all, nor would their wider implications be lost. we still have soap ads today that trade on their imagery and have gotten people in trouble. we already know greasing their hair is seen as disgusting by the socs; that bob leaps to this calls upon this old imagery and all it's connotations.
cherry throwing the coke on dallas is a lesser form of the bath the socs want ponyboy to take.
cherry says ponyboy isn't "dirty." he's "clean" compared to other greasers that she doesn't like, whether he reasons are earned or not. she views ponyboy as a "good" one, who's not unclean in some way. let's swing back to bob and randy:
they do not think cherry is "dirty." she's a symbol of whiteness and purity that they feel they must protect. greaser girls, by that hand, are to them dirty and they no doubt believe that greaser girls aren't nearly as "pure" or "innocent" as cherry.
it makes the choice to "bathe" the greasers much more loaded and it gives a really stark view into the way the socs conduct themselves, the way they view each other and the way that white supremacy exerts itself.
is it just me or has there been like a wave of increased sexism online and irl that you can’t escape and that haunts every trend and conversation with thinly veiled bioessentialism. or has it always been like this and it just feels more insidious now because it’s being marketed in modern quirky progressive language.
i'm working on that esasy but basically gonna focus on cherry as a response to /comment on kathie bleeker in the wild one and judy from rebel without a cause. i also think she's fair to be discussed with regards to maria gloria from crime in the streets and shirley from dino. i think she's more likely a response to the first two while the other two would've been a little less likely in mind when hinton was working on the outsiders.
i do think she's also in contrast to two characters:
daphne from wild seed and barbara bonney from teenage doll. i think you can't really talk about cherry without talking about these other girls.
"you could use a bath." — racialized imagery in the outsiders [vers 1.0]
bob's "protection" of cherry is not simply him trying to "protect" his girlfriend from someone who he thinks is lower than him. his attitude pairs well with and spurred on not just by class but also by white supremacy — a very specific case of witness and class namely that he clearly believes (and cherry somewhat does too) that cherry's whiteness and womanhood is something he has to safeguard from people who are not exactly the same as him. men who are upper class, white, anglo-saxon and protestant (WASPs) in his view are the only people who matter in terms of agency and respect. white women, in this world, are not their own people but extensions of the WASP identity. cherry is someone who's his equal on that field and if cherry deviates even slightly, bob views it as a slight against himself, their class, and racial identity of the time. i have seen people cast his protection as something good or even benevolent and that in and of itself is not what's happening in canon.
white trash doesn't have the same connotations now as it did back then. it was a much worse, personalized and somewhat racialized context. a greaser is not just a class term, it is an ethnic term that basically is a broad "non-white/wasp" that his a broad category.
protecting white womanhood, protecting white purity is a huge tenent of white supremacy. it's very clear from bob and other's actions that they buy into this white supremacy but let's dig a notch further.
let's define greaser. academically.
“Greasers” and “greaseballs” likewise crossed (and were crossed by) racial and national lines. Originally a class and occupational term, greaser named those who greased sheep in preindustrial England and those who lubricated ships and railroad machinery in the nineteenth century. Both James Joyce’s Ulysses and the English translation of Emile Zola’s Nana, for example, refer to greasers working on the rails. Apologists for U.S. slavery seized on the seeming anomaly of begrimed “free” labor in criticizing the proliferation of “greasy mechanics” in the antebellum North. But the term “greaser” acquired its ongoing status as what dictionaries have called a “real Americanism” in referring to Mexicans who came to be within U.S. borders during this period as the United States annexed land. Many stories of its racialized origins preserve association with dirty, manual work. Greasing oxcart and wagon wheels and the guns of Mexican War artillerymen was “Mexican work” in Texas and California when the word gained currency. Trade in tallow, which functioned at times as a kind of currency, also was said to mark Mexican teamsters as greasers in the vocabularies of whites attacking both their greasy jobs and greasy money. [...]
In the twentieth century the terms “greaser” and “greaseball” were applied to many European immigrants, especially Italians and Greeks, as well as to Mexican Americans and to Filipinos. Indeed, the character Nick the Greek is a greaseball in the classic 1932 movie The Smart Money, while an early twentieth-century novelist could be sure his audience would understand his lampooning of grand opera as “a bunch of greasers [singing] a lot of Dago stuff.” In John Fante’s arresting novel Ask the Dust (1939), the connections between Italian American and Mexican American greasers are intricately sketched. The Italian American central character Arturo calls his Mexican American love interest a “filthy little Greaser” and then absolves himself. The slur, he reasons, came not from “my heart” but from the “quivering of an old wound.” That wound, Arturo adds, opened during his childhood in Colorado, where “Smith and Parker and Jones … hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser, and their children hurt me, just as I hurt you tonight.“ Mobsters, especially “unassimilated Sicilian” mobsters, were greasers in San Francisco in the 1930s. William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society suggests that some Italian Americans applied “greaser” to less assimilated countrymen. When Greenwich Village Irish used the epithet “greasy wops,” the supposed physical greasiness of Italians, whether of hair or face, received emphasis as it sometimes did in the slurs of the socialist writer Jack London, regarding Russian Jews. For immigrants who traded, greasy could imply being “slippery” when transacting business, a characteristic the celebrated sociologist Edward A. Ross imputed to Jews. The Dictionary of American Regional English gives “a Mexican or Mexican American” as greaser’s primary meaning and “a person of Mediterranean background” as the second meaning. For greaseball, Mediterranean origins are in the first meaning, with Mexican below. There is no doubt that greaser was a racialized “fighting word,” as C. A. Barnhart put it.
— Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, by David R. Roediger
being called that during that time was a very bad insult and one with racist connotations. as explained above, greaser applied to a large, large swath of people. it's a racialized term, and it's also why it makes sense bob skips to a bath. baths, cleaning, washing are all very racialized imagery in american history.
something i am not sure people are aware of is the imagery of soap and racism. i am going to cut this post; the images are upsetting. if you'd like an academic article to read with images, here and here.
these images circulated in the late 1800s. they would not be unfamiliar to the socs at all, nor would their wider implications be lost. we still have soap ads today that trade on their imagery and have gotten people in trouble. we already know greasing their hair is seen as disgusting by the socs; that bob leaps to this calls upon this old imagery and all it's connotations.
and the novel also invokes this before the bath:
cherry throwing the coke on dallas is a lesser form of the bath the socs want ponyboy to take.
cherry says ponyboy isn't "dirty." he's "clean" compared to other greasers that she doesn't like, whether he reasons are earned or not. she views ponyboy as a "good" one, who's not unclean in some way. let's swing back to bob and randy:
they do not think cherry is "dirty." she's a symbol of whiteness and purity that they feel they must protect. greaser girls, by that hand, are to them dirty and they no doubt believe that greaser girls aren't nearly as "pure" or "innocent" as cherry.
it makes the choice to "bathe" the greasers much more loaded and it gives a really stark view into the way the socs conduct themselves, the way they view each other and the way that white supremacy exerts itself.
it absolutely kills me to see youth lib as a concept being appropriated by people who don’t give a fuck about the safety of children. if you really cared you’d be acknowledging the very real developmental differences between youth and fully grown adults and utilizing this knowledge to work towards a world that encourages children’s growth and creativity and autonomy, provides social safety nets and community—a world that treats youth less like property and more like human beings in a vulnerable state of development.
These people don’t care about the education system, they don’t care about violence and abuse, they don’t care about exploitation, they don’t care about listening to youth. Their ideologies exist detached from reality and consequence.
