Honky

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When he was only three, Dalton Conley did his part for racial integration: He kidnapped the infant daughter of a black separatist down the street. Growing up in Manhattan's Lower East Side and Greenwich Village, Conley realized more than once that the thick ethnic stew of his neighborhood had left him a conspicuous outsider. His unsentimental memoir tells us much about race and class in America, and also much about growing up.

New York Magazine

Honky vividly and subtly evokes the evokes the jarring distinctions of daily life in Manhattan circa 1980.

Jerusalem Post

A quick and easy read, even for those unfamiliar with the setting, the writing is beautiful and the subject matter forever haunting.

San Francisco Chronicle

By the end of this small but absorbing volume, readers will have experienced a rare opportunity for insight into the complexities of race in America. Honky provides a riveting passage through one man's coming of age in an America fractured by color and class but still longing for wholeness.

Guardian UK

Conley has become a superstar by making connections between the field and the personal, or as the mission for his Centre for Advanced Social Science reads linking academy to policy to community. And now, in HONKY, he has mined his own life as a social science experiment.

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 class--where he was the only student not to receive corporal punishment--left 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 poverty--but 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 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Conley (sociology, New York Univ.; Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America) has written a compelling memoir of growing up as a white child in the 1960s in a Manhattan housing project inhabited by African Americans and Latinos. His mother, a writer, and father, an artist, could not afford a middle-class home and refused to borrow from their relatively affluent families. Consequently, Conley's childhood "was like a social science experiment," focusing on the intersections of race and class in late 20th-century America, while his youth provided indelible lessons in the "invisible contours of inequality." The story of the author's best friend, an African American, who was paralyzed in a random shooting, is especially moving. Beautifully written and filled with telling anecdotes, this book is highly recommended.--Anthony O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Conley (Sociology/New York Univ.) recounts his years of growing up poor in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s in the projects on the Lower East Side of New York, where as a white he was a minority amid Latinos, blacks, and Asians. His mother and father were a bohemian couple who abandoned their respectable origins and moved to the inner city. Young Conley went to school first on the Lower East Side first and later in Greenwich Village. The comparison between the poorer schools of the Lower East Side with those of better-off Greenwich Village allows the sociologist in Conley, mercifully gagged until that point, to come gushing through, in the process spilling the jargon of his profession over what had heretofore been a fine first-person narrative. Sociology gets him into trouble in other ways as well. Conley, for example, is inclined to appropriate slang words like "yo" from their present usage back into the late 1960s-when, arguably, it was being used only in some small sectors of the black community. Moreover, the word "honky" is a slightly disingenuous pejorative term, used (by Latinos mostly) more for its shock value than for anything else. More serious still is Conley's portrayal of blacks (and some Latinos, too) as hopeless victims-in contrast to the whites, who emerge triumphantly unscathed to tell the black and Latino stories with all their sympathies in all the right places.