Author’s note: Our class is writing about the main theme of The Outsiders and it was just very easy for me to make connections to this because stereotyping and judging happens a lot in the book and still does now a days.
A dark clothed girl walks down the hallway receiving glares from everyone. A glasses wearing and braced boy sits down at a lunch table and everyone else gets up and leaves. A teenage girl wearing such a simple and dirty outfit comes into class late only to have every person look up at her and grimace. These situations are very strong and true examples of stereotyping. Stereotyping goes on everywhere. People discriminate others just because of how the look, talk, act, and their backgrounds. This unfair judgment goes on everywhere, including schools, neighborhoods, and even between the closest of friends. One example I came across not too long ago, was in the book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinston.
The main theme of the book The Outsiders is stereotyping.. The people in this book are always fighting over where they come from or where they’ve been. Mostly they fight because one group has been born into a perfect family. This group is called the “Socialites” or “Socs” They’re the lucky ones with the wealth; what more could you ask for? Alongside, there is another group: “Greasers.” The people in this group are much less fortunate. They have a poor family, fight- picking friends, and people who have been grabbed by the “fuzz” tens and hundreds of times. No matter how different these groups are, everyone is trying their best to live. In the end everyone is just a person trying to make it in this crazy world, just like you and me.
There were many scenes that stereotyping was demonstrated. One seen in particular was very interesting. It was the scene in which Pony, the Greaser, and Randy, the Soc talked by the gas station. What really stuck out to me, in this scene, was the simple point that Randy talks to Ponyboy. This is surprising because they come from completely different sides of the tracks and they were just about to go into a head to head rumble. Then the most astonishing thing came out of that Soc’s mouth. This quote really stuck out to me, “You can’t win even if you whip us. You can’t win even if you whip us. You’ll still be where you are, and we’ll still be the lucky ones with all the breaks. So it doesn’t do any good fighting and killing. It doesn’t prove a thing. We’ll forget if you win or if you don’t Socs will still be Socs and Greasers will still be Greasers. Sometimes I think it’s the ones in the middle are the lucky stiffs……” And another quote that stuck out was when later, Ponyboy whispered, “He ain’t a Soc he’s just a guy who wanted to talk.” That moment those people had put aside differences and each had become a human in each other’s eyes.
Throughout the book each character has hardships a little different from one another, but always under one big picture. Even though there were two completely different gangs with completely different people, most of them had the same kind of tribulations. Bob and Johnny both ended up dying and they both had family problems. In the end people are people, no matter their skin color, hair color, or where they were born, or anything else. People are still fighting today; there are huge gang rivals in California and all over the world that. They will never stop despising each other. They will never stop fighting each other. They will never come to realize that they are all one big group of people. They will never understand that we all are family, under one big roof of god.
That’s how the Bloods, Crips, and KKK’s work. People are shot and killed for wearing the wrong color in a certain side of a town. It’s completely and utterly ridicules. We understand that, the characters in The Outsiders understood that, the government understands that, everyone besides those blindly blade- swinger and punch-throwers understand that. In The Outsiders, only three people died, multiply this by the world’s population and you have hundreds and thousands dying. The citizens of the world need to stop hating and killing or soon there will be no one, nobody, and nothing at all.
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