THE OUTSIDERS

My 8th graders have been reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. If you are not familiar with the novel, it was published in 1967 when the author was just 18 years old and it heralded a new, grittier take on young adult fiction. (Susan Eloise Hinton, by the way, was convinced by her publisher to use only her initials in order not to alienate any young male readers who might find themselves biased against a female author.) 

I had never read the book before this school year, but I am left with two distinct impressions:

First,  it is a pretty impressive bit of work for a teenage author. 

And second, its prescription for addressing prejudice strikes me as right on target ... and the polar opposite of what's in vogue in modern American culture.

You see, The Outsiders is a story of the tragic interaction between two rival groups, the southside Socs (short for "Socials", the country club set) and the northside Greasers (the juvenile delinquent types). But it can be viewed as an analogy for any sort of group identity, "us vs. them" situation. 

The narrator of the story is a Greaser named Ponyboy Curtis, who comes to an important realization with the help of a likeminded Soc girl named Cherry: it's easy to hate an entire group of people when your own group is invested in seeing - and resenting - only the stereotype and not individual human beings. 

The vast majority of characters surrounding Ponyboy, both Soc and Greaser, are invested in stoking hatred and are tragically blind to the ways their words and actions contribute to the continuation of strife and destruction. And even death.

But Ponyboy, at first shocked to find he has anything in common with any Soc, soon comes to see other people as particular individuals, with their own strengths and weaknesses and struggles, regardless of their group identity, and thus he becomes a firewall against further animosity. 

So this has left me with a mystery: If a teenager of the 60s could discern the path forward through prejudice, why are the adults in charge today so blind to it?