Summary Of Honky By Dalton Conley

The book Honky by Dalton Conley is a book about the life of a white male who grew up in a slum neighborhood. It is an autobiography that is slightly humorous in how Conley explains his life and through it how he learned about race and class. In the beginning of the book, he describes how oblivious he was to skin colors and what they meant. Then when he was older and knew about race, how he learned about class. This work of literature explains how his upbringing truly taught him to distinguish differences in race and how it relates to class. In the first chapter of Honky, titled “Black Babies,” Conley found himself a baby sister. His mother was pregnant and all he wanted was to be an older brother. His parents constantly reminded him of this

Shouldn’t his parents provide a suburban cookie cutter house to live in? Conley addresses this confusion. The answer is he does not entirely know himself. Instead he offers a couple of hypothesis to why he grew up in the ghetto. One of these hypotheses was from a story that both his mother and father told him. The story explained that there was a thief who threatened their lives so they had to make a quick move to an available place. He explains the differences between himself and his neighbors in both a sense of race but also class. His mother seemed to have “white guilt” for taking up the space of another family who could not afford living somewhere better. The mix of class and race is shown because Conley expresses how his family had a security blanket of his grandparents, who were wealthy, while many of the other people living in the projects did not have that fall back plan. This fact mentioned so early in the work indicates that at an early age he started to realize he may live in a more stable environment than his peers. It is also mentioned that the structures never changed, which indicate the social standing of this neighborhood. Throughout the moon landing, oil shock of 1973 and many business cycles the projects where Conley lived never changed, to emphasize this, he called it a “static

It was slightly shown to him when he went to his first school there was some classroom segregation because everybody was corporally punished except for him. This was due solely to his race. When he moved to a new school, Greenwich Village School, he was introduced to a whole new type of separation due to class. The majority of the student body was also white so he was not sticking out like he had at his previous school. Through this new social standing he had to pretend he knew what they were speaking about. He distinguishes that the children from the wealthier families do not live in fear but look forward to the future. Dalton even participated in a political school rally that he did not knew as much about. Many of the pupils “voted” for the Carter because they had liberal parents and were supposedly corrupted with doughnuts. Another interesting detail being that he mentioned that his classmates spoke in softer voices which was a major contrast to his previous learning environment. He also learned that his due to his previous school district, he was academically behind his new classmates. An indicator popularly used to distinguish class was through articulation. Where Conley grew up the way he spoke was not up to the same level in his classroom. This made him feel self-conscience and want to learn facts and skill that would make him fit into his class. Through this Conley was slightly ashamed to bring his friends