Papers On Honky By Dalton Conley

Honky by Dalton Conley is a contemporary nonfiction novel about a white sociologist who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a predominantly Latino and African-American neighborhood around the late 1970’s, the early 80’s. Conley details his experiences in the book Honky which serves a sort of memoir and offers the readers a unique and insightful insight into the what life was like during these times, how the social constructs of class and race affected everyday life, and how the subsections of these groups created a system in which certain groups were afforded greater opportunities than others. Off the bat, this was a very interesting read that I wish I had come across sooner.

"I've studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language,"

For Dalton Conley, who came from a impoverished middle class family, this was not his reality. For most of Dalton’s young life, the notion of race was entirely foreign to him. He thought of himself as no different than the people he saw every day. They all went to the same schools, lived in the same squalor which to Dalton meant that they must be the same. According to Dalton the signs that he was the same as everyone else was the fact that there was graffiti everywhere

Page 2 they were separate from the rest of the world due to the Con Edison Plant, and that they lived in Slums, all typical signs of poverty at that time. At this time Dalton was pretty much the only white kid in his apartment complex.

Around the age of three Dalton attempts to acquire himself a new baby sister by abducting a young girl from a family of black separatists. His youth and innocence to how the world really was made him naive to the racial constructs around him, but as he grew he started learning the complexities that came along with race and racial status in America. When describing his childhood Dalton talks about it as some sort of social experiment about figuring out what it really meant to be middle class. This type of unique perspective in conjuncture with Conley’s flair for observance offers the reader an

He and his sister attended a nursery school that was funded by the federal government, where they had to deal with issues because their skin was white and no one else was. It was here that Dalton and his family learned that skin color mattered in the world in that can define where you belong in terms of social standing. Dalton desperately desired to be a part of the group of his peers, to receive the same treatment as they did, so much so that he wished to be called “nigga” so that he would feel like one of them. In this Dalton shows an interesting turn in which he as a white person is experiencing the stigma that can come along with being a minority in his world, while at the same time still possessing white privilege and being a part of the majority in the world at