Joshua Glucksman’s Reviews > The Bluest Eye > Status Update

“Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with-probably because it was abstract. But the concreteness of being outdoors was another matter. “

Within this context, I understood the “outdoors” to symbolize the abstract space where American society has been trying to push Black people, and not as referring only to the actual outdoors. Here, the “outdoors” hints to, in my opinion, that sub-human category to which they have been assigned. A category which useful to justify their enslavement and which, in the Jim Crow era, can be used to regard segregationist legislations as fair if not just.

On another note, the anxious efforts shown by Black people in trying to “stay indoors” while imo simply the product of social conditioning, intergenerational trauma and real material limitations due to racial caste, could also be seen as complicit in upholding the racist idea that Black people are subhuman and that they can only hope to gain a semblance of human characteristics by assimilating themselves into the White culture (e.g., adopting the “American Dream”).

In all fairness, I could see how, on one hand, this frenzy could be seen as evidence that Black people themselves feel like they have to prove their humanity (overcompensating). On the other, I could also see how this “quirk” could give outsiders another reason to cast them as “Other” and so as “less-than”: Propretied Black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, …” (re: the comparisons between animals and Black people). Moreover, what can be said of the fact that they themselves describe people like Cholly (people who fail stay “indoors”) in animalistic terms: “He had joined the animals; was, indeed, an old dog, a snake, a ratty nigger”?

The way I see it
1. Being indoors, in the literal sense of the word, is first and foremost about survival. In the symbolic sense (of being regarded as “human”) it also is about survival!! and so any “complicity” of Black people should be seen as an effort to survive in an hostile environment and NOT a justification for its hostility. How useful that is in actuality is another conversation of its own.
2. In fact, Interpreting Black people’s housing insecurities as proof of their doubt about their humanity seems like the product of bad faith reasoning imo because it completely ignores the social, political, economical and HISTORICAL context.
3. As emphasized in point 1, This sort of analysis is really mostly relevant on a theoretical level. The aim is not to group people as homogenous because of a few shared characteristic : that’s where racism take roots.

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“… trying hard to keep her from feeling outdoors” is employed right after to talk about Pecola, I just noticed!