Seventy-five years ago, Holden Caulfield put on his hunting hat and declared it a people shooting hat. He quickly became the hypocritical, rebellious anti-hero that has resonated with young people for generations. My older sister handed me The Catcher in the Rye when I was fifteen. I read it on a family vacation, ignoring everyone around me in favor of Holden. And then I read it for English class and wrote a paper that was fifteen pages longer than the requirement. As a closeted queer and trans teen, I felt seen by this misanthropic, alienated loner who simultaneously rejected his peers and yearned for their company and connection.
But perhaps the most relatable aspect of Holden, for me, was his rejection of capitalistic ideals, consumerism, and the resulting emptiness. As a child, I wanted to be a WNBA player. More than anything in the world. I devoted myself to basketball, in so far as it was the only future I could conceive for myself.
I didn’t care about the money, or lack thereof, at the time (this was thirty years before the WNBA and the historic Collective Bargaining Agreement that resulted in the players being paid what they deserve). I just wanted to ball. It was my joy, my pleasure, my site of devotion and worship. And I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand how this joy was connected to capitalism. And, more broadly, my alleged worth.
When I told my well-meaning parents my dream, they said, “WNBA players don’t make very much money.”
Money: I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, let alone the love of my life. I could not see a career for myself. I could not see myself as part of the workforce or the workforce as I imagined it: business clothes, briefcases, a suffocating 9-5, a rush-hour commute. I only saw myself as a part of a team, gathering around center court, slapping hands with our opponents, ready to make history from the tip-off. Just as Holden only wanted to be “the catcher in the rye,” a role he invented, I only wanted to be the point guard in the key. Dishing a no-look pass to a teammate for an easy two. I would have done it forever, for zero dollars. Or at least, I really believed that, until I entered adulthood, and the reality of late-stage capitalism slapped me in the face.
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Holden, our ignorant, white protagonist, imagined being the catcher in the rye as existing outside of capitalism, or rather, as an anti-capitalist tool. He imagined kids playing a game in a field of rye and he would prevent them from falling over the cliff—the transition from innocent childhood to corrupt or phony adulthood. In this way, he would prevent children from becoming unrecognizable capitalists. I admired his goal of committing his life to maintaining the innocence of children—a goal that undoubtedly was influenced by the Romantic period, which both established the child as “other,” and as a pure, imaginative, and even divine. An act that is, in and of itself, violent: we know what happens when we other a group of people, whether through romanticization or ostracization. Othering is a fast track to dehumanization, discrimination, and oppression. But let’s assume that Holden, a teen seduced by fantasy and idealization, didn’t understand the violence of othering. Let’s assume it is protection and care for children that he is after. I wonder, I hope: did he mean all children? Across race, culture, class, ability, gender, sexuality, and religion? Or did he mean only white, affluent kids like himself?
In her incredible book, Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy, Madeline Lane-McKinley asks, “Which children get to be innocent? Said another way, which children get to be seen as children?” She goes on to consider the children who are murdered, the children who live in fear of state-enacted violence, the children detained, abused, and isolated by ICE. “Black children are six times more likely than white children to be shot by police in the United States. Black children, in this sense, don’t get to be children.”
And neither do the children of Palestine, who, throughout this genocide, have been reduced to non-humans by Israel and the U.S. And certainly, neither do the upwards of 160 million children worldwide who are engaged in child labor, with 79 million performing work that is physically hazardous and harmful.
The cruelty is unthinkable.
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The Catcher in the Rye is not without its racism, microaggressions, and stereotypes, such as Holden’s description of Ernie, the Black piano player: “He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes.” He also exoticizes a Chinese woman his old friend is dating. Would Holden have given children of color the same label of “innocence” as his kid sister, Phoebe, as the presumed innocent white children of his imagination? What about children with severe mental illness? With a history of violence? Are they still innocent? Would he have adopted James Baldwin’s perspective that “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”?
In Jackie Wang’s Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety, she notes, “Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society.” While this statement applies to the assumed guilt of Black people, especially men, in this country, as well as the harmful nature of using innocence as “the foundation to address anti-Black violence,” I believe it can also apply to the violent categorization of children as innocent or “unchildren,” as Lane-McKinley refers to them.
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We often view innocence through the lens of a romanticized childhood, one that is protected and safe, full of play, discovery, joy, friendships, and adventures. Perhaps that is why I look back on my time playing basketball through rose-colored glasses, when in fact, it was always corrupt and oppressive—from racism (particularly anti-Blackness) and homophobia to sexism and coach abuse. The intersection of capitalism and basketball meant that only those with enough money could play on highly-recruited, elite AAU basketball teams, teams that got the most exposure and gave players a significant leg-up in getting a college scholarship. Holden would certainly huff at the desire to go to college in the first place, given his critique of educational environments as pipelines for corporate greed and materialism: “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddamn Cadillac some day.” What he was missing, perhaps, was the notion that one need not be smart to afford a Cadillac: only privileged, and, much like the youth basketball industrial complex, well-connected.
I am, once again, thinking about Ernie and Holden’s judgment of his “dumb, show-offy ripples.” I am thinking about how that sort of language is often weaponized against Black basketball players who are good, and they know it, and they let us know they know it. I am thinking about Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay, “On Marathons and Tunnels,” in Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, and how he says, “I consider, often, the difference between showing off and showing out. How showing off is something you do for the world at large and showing out is something you do strictly for your people.” Ernie isn’t showing off; he’s showing out, for his people in that jazz club. And that, as Abdurraqib notes in an interview, is “an ecstasy beyond language.” This showing out, unlike childhood, is romantic.
In the unromantic childhood, children are anything but protected; they are vulnerable to violence and exploitation, oppressed, treated as property, stripped of meaningful rights, and treated as less than human. They are exposed to abuse, neglect, homelessness, war, genocide, child labor, human trafficking, mass shootings, poverty, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and beyond.
What say you now, Holden? How is preventing these children from going over the cliff of adulthood—where they, depending on various identity labels, will be granted rights and agency—in any way helping them? It is a self-serving, egotistical venture, saviorism in a coming-of-age package. Adults love the idea of “saving” children. It’s romantic, it’s inspirational; it centers the adults and negates the very children they claim to want to save. Saving the children is paternalistic; it is self-heroism and myth-making. What we need, what Lane-McKinley’s book argues for, is solidarity with children, which is revolutionary and collective, treating children with dignity, agency, and respect, fighting against adult supremacy in the pursuit of child liberation. If the child wants to go over the cliff, let them go over the damn cliff. And instead of attempting to “save” them, why don’t we build a new world in the rye together, a safer, more fulfilling place for them to land?
I once dreamt of Holden Caulfield catching me in the rye so that I could stay young forever, but now I dream of child liberation, of building a socialist society that would make adulthood welcoming and beautiful. I dream of a socialist world centered on utility and sustainability, in which Cadillacs don’t exist. I want to help usher in generations that don’t understand Holden’s disillusionment one bit. Who cannot comprehend what he means by the word “phonies.” Who, when they look around them, they don’t see oppressors and saviors, romantics and deniers—they see collaborators, they see open hands, inviting them to dismantle adult power, together.
