And to be honest, people should be scared of White Sox fans, as they are the baseball equivalent of self-flagellators. White Sox fans, as you all know, are a mystery to everyone that isn’t a White Sox fan. That fear and unknowing extends to White Sox fans.

I can only speak from a transplant’s experience, but the image outsiders (especially white folks) have conjured up of the South Side is one of wild-eyed fear and unknowing. In contemporary times, it seems at times to be the South Side against the rest of Chicago and the world. Slap an expressway in the middle of everything to further divide people, and, in an incredibly brief oversimplification, the South Side has long been a cauldron of racial, labor, and class tensions. The Red Summer of 1919 occurred as a result of racial tensions bubbling over after increased job and housing competition. Rich black industry grew in the South Side, but it was not without struggle. The South Side in particular was home several working class industries (meat packing, steel mills, and basically all the other jobs no one wanted to do) as well as a large amount of black Chicagoans who arrived in the city after Reconstruction and in the Great Migration. These early strikers were men, women, and children who hailed from Pilsen, Bridgeport, Pullman, and other South Side neighborhoods. In the early 20th Century, Chicago was the site of many critical labor upheavals. Regardless of your social, economic, or political stances, it is a fact that Chicago has a vibrant and rich legacy or immigrant and working class neighborhoods. If you build it … #whitesox #fieldofdreams /0VY8hYCpRI The Jacobin, a publication that describes itself as “a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture,” claimed Gritty for the left with a simple tweet:Īlthough Gritty has been crowned as King of the Working Class, I would like to propose an alternative leader: Southpaw, the Chicago White Sox mascot. What initially began as a Philly-area adoption of Gritty as a leftist idol has become a nationwide sentiment. It makes a perplexing amount of sense that leftists have co-opted Gritty as a symbol of antifascism and working class rebellion. If you look long enough into the void, the void looks back through you. Gritty’s batshit gaze is the embodiment of something Friedrich Nietzche said: Until I looked deeply into Gritty’s eyes. You may be thinking “Well, that doesn’t really sound too different from other ambiguous sports mascots.” Gritty is a seven-foot-tall, amorphous, orange, hirsute being. me to briefly step across the sports aisle to discuss Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty.

Hero of the masses: Gritty, meet a true mascot of the people, Southpaw.

Southpaw by Frank King