Honky [Hardcover]

Dalton Conley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2000

This intensely personal and engaging memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view--the streets, buses, and playgrounds--Honky poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often funny memories, Conley shows how race and class shaped his life and the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. A brilliant case study for illuminating the larger issues of inequality in American society, Honky brings us to a deeper understanding of the privilege of whiteness, the social construction of race, the power of education, and the challenges of inner-city life.
Conley's father, a struggling artist, and his mother, an aspiring writer, joined Manhattan's bohemian subculture in the late 1960s, living on food stamps and raising their family in a housing project. We come to know his mother: her quirky tastes, her robust style, and the bargains she strikes with Dalton--not to ride on the backs of buses, and to always carry money in his shoe as protection against muggers. We also get to know his father, his face buried in racing forms, and his sister, who in grade school has a burning desire for cornrows. From the hilarious story of three-year-old Dalton kidnapping a black infant so he could have a baby sister to the deeply disturbing shooting of a close childhood friend, this memoir touches us with movingly rendered portraits of people and the unfolding of their lives.
Conley's story provides a sophisticated example of the crucial role culture plays in defining race and class. Both of Conley's parents retained the "cultural capital" of the white middle class, and they passed this on to their son in the form of tastes, educational expectations, and a general sense of privilege. It is these advantages that ultimately provide Conley with his ticket to higher education and beyond. A tremendously good read, Honky addresses issues both timely and timeless that pertain to us all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"I've studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language," declares Conley at the outset of his affecting, challenging memoir, laced with the retrospective wisdom of the sociologist (at New York University) he has become. As the child of bohemian, white parents, he grew up in an otherwise black and Hispanic housing project on New York's Lower East Side. At elementary school in the 1970s, he found himself placed in the "Chinese class," after his stint in the black classAwhere he was the only student not to receive corporal punishmentAleft him uncomfortable. Despite the family's lack of funds, they had cultural capital in the form of social connections, and were able to transfer young Dalton to a better school, where he began to feel some snobbery toward kids in his own neighborhood. Yet the friend who accepted Dalton most was a black youth from the neighborhood, Jerome, who was tragically disabled in a random act of violence that helped spur Conley's parents to leave the Lower East Side for subsidized housing for artists. Part of the memoir concerns the universality of povertyAbut a thoughtful examination of the privileges of race and class also emerges. Despite the book's title, the author cites only one major episode in which he was threatened and called "honky." Conley acknowledges that he doesn't know how to account for such successes as gaining admission into the selective Bronx High School of Science: race? parental protectiveness? his own aspirations? It is "the privilege of the middle and upper classes," he observes, to construct narratives of their own success "rather than having the media and society do it for us." (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Conley, a sociology professor, brings to his analysis of race a unique experience in the social and racial maze of New York City. Conley grew up in a Manhattan housing project that was predominantly black and Hispanic. Yet his minority white status offered a perspective and insight into the analysis of American race and class conflict. Conley found himself placed with Asian students on a higher academic track in elementary school, later migrated downtown to the Village with rich white students in junior high school, and was finally placed in one of the more selective public high schools. Throughout his personal journey, he learns that class and race are interwoven in a complex social fabric making it somewhat difficult to determine which is the dominant factor. While Conley appears to maintain close personal friendships with minorities, his whiteness still provides him with opportunities not available to his black and Hispanic neighbors. Conley's perspective on his youth is likely reconstructive and colored by preferences. Yet his book offers a clarity and simplicity that is insightful and raises concerns of a more universal significance. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520215869
• ISBN-13: 978-0520215863
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,014,116 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars CONFUSING AND TROUBLING, October 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Honky (Hardcover)

I found this book both conmfusing and troubling. As a black man who grew up on the Lower East Side of New York, I find conley's observations out of sync with my own. First of all: the Masaryk Towers--the "project" where he lived--was not a PUBLIC housing project, nor was it low income. Its population was far more mixed than the projects where I grew up. His stories, while well written at times, seem forced--as if to prove a point: white people have privileges that black people do not. I think we know this already.

As a person of color, I felt a bit hurt by the book's constant opposition between white sucess and black failure. If it's stereotypes the author is trying to attack, he sure doesn't succeed. Black people are type cast in this racial drama. My life growing up was filled with rituals, joy, ideas. His picture of black life is filled with anger, tragedy, and sadness. Where is the positive, complex side of black life on the Lower East Side.

As for the book's title: I've never called ANYONE honky. Was Conley called honky? The title of the book--like so many of Conley's stories--typecasts black people in a confusing and troubling way. Our lives are as complicated as white people's. I wish this book had shown this. Too bad. I think Conley means well. He just doesn't get it.

34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars interesting but not completely honest, January 23, 2005

By 

Daniel Holt (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honky (Paperback)

I found this to be an interesting and frustrating book. Dalton is a decent, though self-indulgent writer, who is able to create good narrative momentum. He has some interesting if not very deep things to say about race and class and childhood. But everything positive about the book was deeply undermined for me because it contains a great deal of factual error and distortion. I know this because my family figures prominently in his story. He was my brother's best friend during a critical period of their childhoods, which Dalton recounts at considerable length. And much of what he says is simply wrong. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wrote things as he remembers them and did not deliberately embellish the story. But the inaccuracies are significant because they pertain to the very heart of what he is trying to say. When Dalton transferred to PS41, he moved into a very different socioeconomic sphere, and the contrast between his earlier experiences and the new world he entered affected him deeply. Those contrasts--and the meanings he draws from them--are a great deal of what he tries to make sense of in the book. And that is what makes his inaccuracies so troubling. The portrait he paints of my family is of an extremely privileged, wealthy clan of economic and cultural elitists. That makes a better story, but it is also false. It makes me wonder just how accurate his other memories are. Is what he says about other people, places, and experiences as distorted as what he says about my family? His book is a clear lesson in just how subjective and unreliable memoirs are as sources of information about anything or anyone other than their authors. If you read this book, you'll know what Dalton thinks his childhood was like. No more, no less.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Honky in the Hood, July 23, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Honky (Paperback)

About midway through his excellent, humorous and poignant memoir of growing up white in the mostly minority inner-city that comprises the edges of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Dalton Conley strives to comprehend the forces that enabled him, unaccompanied by his non-white peers, to transcend the urban blight that characterized both the outer and inner landscapes of those living in his neighborhood. "I'll never know whether it was my mother's protectiveness, my expectations and aspirations, or simply my race that spared me from a worse fate," writes Conley. "I will never know the true cause and effect in the trajectory of my life. And maybe it is better this way. I can believe what I want to believe. This is the privilege of the middle and upper classes in America - the right to make up the reasons things turn out the way they do, to construct our own narratives rather than having the media and society do it for us." Honky, at its core, is Conley's construction of his own narrative, a thoughtful examination of the trajectories that were at force in his childhood, as well as a personal and moving account of his gradual childhood acknowledgement of the significance of his whiteness and the privileges of race and class while growing up in multiple, unequal worlds. Clearly his book has a lot to teach - and it does - but in a thoughtful and non-preachy manner.

As a coming-of-age story, Honky is a study in contrasts: a child of white, progressive, and poor parents growing up in an otherwise Black and Hispanic housing project, an inner-city boy predominantly schooled in upper middle class public schools, and a fledgling, awkward teenager slowly seeing and coming to understand what he lyrically claims are the "invisible contours of inequality" that peopled the many worlds he simultaneously inhabited. His account is as refreshingly straightforward as it is honest, as, for example, when he realizes after moving from the inner-city with his family into a mostly white neighborhood during his high-school years his own self-proclaimed social awkwardness. "I paced in circles," writes Conley, "like a dosed up laboratory animal, wishing I were back in our old neighborhood, where at least I had my skin color to blame for not fitting in."

Conley's aim throughout his memoir is not so much to preach but to demonstrate, and by demonstrating, uncover what are essentially both the paradoxes and determinants of race and class in America. "If the exception proves the rule," he declares, "I'm that exception." He is forthright about the "cultural capital" of his family, that which allowed them, for example, to work the public schooling system to their advantage, using the addresses of friends in better neighborhoods as their own so that the author and his sister could attend better schools - an advantage seldom available to their minority peers. And never more aware is Conley of the lingering scars he harbors, both physical and emotional, that are the remnants of the violence that plagued his neighborhood in the 1970's and 80's and of which he carries today in his adulthood.

Honky is a must-read for those interested in complexities of race and class in America today. It provides a first-hand account of one who was forced to grapple with the language and idioms of whiteness in a way that most non-minority Americans take for granted. And his take on poverty in America is especially clear and bleak, a reflection by one who was able to both live in and transcend its grasp. Conley, now a sociologist at Yale, who is trained to develop statistical models to examine sociological problems, quips at the end of his memoir that "what's gained in story is lost in numbers." As regards to Honky we are fortunate that is the case.

Brian T. Peterson, New York City