This vivid memoir captures how race, class, and privilege shaped a white boy's coming of age in 1970s New York-now with a new epilogue. "I am not your typical middle-class white male," begins Dalton Conley's Honky, an intensely engaging memoir of growing up amid predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. In narrating these sharply observed memories, from his little sister's burning desire for cornrows to the shooting of a close childhood friend, Conley shows how race and ...
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This vivid memoir captures how race, class, and privilege shaped a white boy's coming of age in 1970s New York-now with a new epilogue. "I am not your typical middle-class white male," begins Dalton Conley's Honky, an intensely engaging memoir of growing up amid predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. In narrating these sharply observed memories, from his little sister's burning desire for cornrows to the shooting of a close childhood friend, Conley shows how race and class inextricably shaped his life-as well as the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. In a new afterword, Conley, now a well-established senior sociologist, provides an update on what his informants' respective trajectories tell us about race and class in the city. He further reflects on how urban areas have (and haven't) changed over the past few decades, including the stubborn resilience of poverty in New York. At once a gripping coming-of-age story and a brilliant case study illuminating broader inequalities in American society, Honky guides us to a deeper understanding of the cultural capital of whiteness, the social construction of race, and the intricacies of upward mobility.
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Having grown up in a NYC housing project and engaged in writing my own book on the topic, I was interested in reading about Conley's everyday life in Alphabet City. Conley's book reminded me a little of Norman Podhoretz's essay My Negro Problem -- And Ours. I'm not an adherent of Podhoretz's politics but I thought Podhoretz's piece was very good because of its personal honesty (my Jewish working class family was, like Podhoretz's, from Brownsville, Brooklyn). I had one small problem with Conley's book. It was in his interjection of academic sociology into the text, detracting from the text's personal nature. Yes, he is a sociologist. But he is also a memoirist, and his memory should do the speaking. For example, in an episode in chapter 9, a minority kid almost stabs Conley and steals Conley's precious baseball glove. At the end of the chapter the author more or less excuses the bully with a short exegesis on the privilege of the middle and upper classes. It is as if he put these interjections into the book for fear of being seen as prejudiced. If he would have left them out, the book would have been better (and only a careless reader would have thought him prejudiced). The sociology detracts from the here-and-now that Dalton the child is feeling. Podhoretz doesn't do that, and pours out the his and his family members' awful feelings. That kind of terrible honesty makes for good writing.
