University of Nairobi Honky by Dalton Conley 2020 Book Analysis Essay Please find the attached pics. Do write essay about Honky by Dalton Conley. Use quote

University of Nairobi Honky by Dalton Conley 2020 Book Analysis Essay Please find the attached pics. Do write essay about Honky by Dalton Conley. Use quotes with support/explain. Honky
University of California Press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
Honky
Dalton Conley
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2000 by Dalton Conley
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley, Dalton, 1969–
Honky / Dalton Conley.
p. cm.
1.White children—New York (State)—New
York—Social conditions. 2.Whites—New York
(State)—New York—Race identity. 3.Whites—
New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. AfroAmerican children—New York (State)—New
York—Social conditions. 5. Hispanic American children—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. 6. Race awareness in children—New York
(State)—New York. 7. Social classes—New York
(State)—New York—History—20th century.
8. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)—Social
conditions. I.Title.
hq792.u5 c66 2000
305.26’09747—dc21
cip
00-023774
For Jerome
“Your mother is so white,
she went to her own wedding naked.”
Prologue
xi
two
Trajectories
9
three
Downward Mobility
19
four
Race Lessons
37
five
Fear
55
six
Learning Class
67
seven
The Hawk
79
eight
Getting Paid
97
nine
Sesame Street
111
ten
Welcome to America
121
eleven
No Soap Radio
133
twelve
Moving On Up
143
thirteen
Disco Sucks
151
fourteen
Addictions
165
fifteen
Symmetry
177
sixteen
Fire
191
seventeen
Cultural Capital
203
Epilogue
219
Author’s Note
229
Contents
one
Black Babies
1
Prologue
am not your typical middle-class white male. I am middle
class, despite the fact that my parents had no money; I am
white, but I grew up in an inner-city housing project where
most everyone was black or Hispanic. I enjoyed a range of
privileges that were denied my neighbors but that most Americans take for granted. In fact, my childhood was like a social
science experiment: Find out what being middle class really
means by raising a kid from a so-called good family in a socalled bad neighborhood. Define whiteness by putting a lightskinned kid in the midst of a community of color. If the exception proves the rule, I’m that exception.
Ask any African American to list the adjectives that describe
them and they will likely put black or African American at the top
of the list. Ask someone of European descent the same question and white will be far down the list, if it’s there at all. Not
so for me. I’ve studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language. I know its grammar, its parts of speech; I know the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and phrases to which
the native speaker has never given a second thought.There’s an
Prologue
I
old saying that you never really know your own language until
you study another. It’s the same with race and class.
In fact, race and class are nothing more than a set of stories
we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality. And there was no one who told more stories to me than
my mother, Ellen. One of her favorites was how I had wanted
a baby sister so badly that I kidnapped a black child in the playground of the housing complex. She told this story each time
my real sister, Alexandra, and I were standing, arms crossed,
facing away from each other after some squabble or fistfight.
The moral of the story for my mother was that I should love
my sister, since I had wanted to have her so desperately. The
message I took away, however, was one of race. I was fascinated
that I could have been oblivious to something that years later
feels so natural, so innate as race does . . .
xii
one
s my mother tells it, the week before I kidnapped the black
baby I broke free from her in the supermarket, ran to the back
of the last aisle, and grabbed the manager’s microphone. “I want
a baby sister,” I announced, my almost-three-year-old voice reverberating off ceiling-high stacks of canned Goya beans.
“I want a baby sister,” I repeated, evidently intrigued by the
fact that my own voice seemed to be coming from everywhere. Soon my mother’s shopping cart was rattling across the
floor of the refrigerated back row where all the meats were
kept. I can envision the two long braids on either side of her
head flapping maniacally, as if they were wings trying to lift her
and the cart off the ground. She was, in fact, pregnant. She had
explained to me what this meant a week earlier, and I had become fixated on it, asking each day how much longer it would
be. My parents tolerated this first of my many obsessions,
happy that at least I was not resentful and jealous, though they
wondered why I so much wanted the baby to be a girl and not
another something like myself.
Black Babies
A
“How old will I be when the baby’s born?” I asked one day.
The next morning I continued my questioning: “When I’m
five, how old will the baby be?” Soon after that I started to
worry about its sex: “When will we know it’s a sister and not a
brother?” Skin color never entered my line of questioning.
My parents did their best to engage my curiosity, each in
their own way. While my father, Steve, used colored pens to
handicap the Racing Form, he gave me some markers and told
me to draw a picture of the baby. I rushed through this endeavor using only the black marker and produced something
that looked like his sweat-smeared copy of the Form after a long
day at the racetrack. Steve, a painter, had just gotten into a
black-and-white phase himself and was touched by my colorless effort; he pinned it up on the wall above the dining room
table, where it hung for years.
In contrast to my father, with his visual orientation, my
mother, a writer, took a verbal approach. She instructed me to
think of an adjective for each letter of the alphabet to describe
how I would like my younger sibling to be.We only got through
“a-door-bell,” my word for adorable, and then to brown before I
got exasperated and insisted that she tell me what the baby
would be like—as if she knew and was holding out on me.
Finally, I could stand the wait no longer. About a week after
the supermarket incident, I swiped a baby myself.While playing in our housing project’s courtyard, I found an unattended
stroller. In it was a toddler just a few months younger than me,
with cornrows braided so tightly on her little head that they
pulled the skin on her face tautly upward. I remember that she
Honky
Black Babies
was smiling up at me, and I must have taken this as permission.
I reached up to grab the handles of the carriage, pushed it
across the shards of broken green and brown malt liquor bottles that littered the concrete, and proudly delivered it to my
mother, who was sitting on a bench with a neighbor.
“I found my baby sister,” I declared, jamming the stroller
into her shin for emphasis.
“No you haven’t,” my mother replied, putting her hand over
her open mouth. She turned to her neighbor on the splintered
green bench. “Do you know where her mother is?”
The child’s parents—leaders of the neighborhood black separatist organization—lived in our building, on our very floor.
By now the baby was crying, and I was jumping up and down
with excitement, laughing with delight at my success. But my
laughter soon dissolved into tears, for my mother immediately
seized the plastic handles of the stroller and returned it from
where it came. She made a beeline across the concrete, over the
black rubber tiles of the kiddie area and under the jungle gym,
all the way to the other side of the playground, where a woman
was pacing frantically back and forth, her Muslim head scarf
flowing out behind her like a proud national flag. When my
mother finally reached the woman she apologized repeatedly,
explaining that she could certainly empathize with the experience, since I escaped from her sight several times a week. The
woman said nothing, her silent glare through narrowed eyes a
powerful statement in itself, while the baby and I went on
screaming and crying a cacophonous chorus.
After the kidnapping, the separatist mother did not speak to
3
us for a month, as if we had confirmed her worst suspicions
about white people. Then, just as the springtime buds were
starting to blossom, she talked to my mother in the elevator.
“April is the cruelest month,” she said, as if T. S. Eliot were
code for something.Whenever my mother would tell this part
of the story, her voice would soften and trail off. Only later did
I figure out that she remembered it so vividly out of a sense of
liberal, racial guilt—guilt over her surprise at hearing a black
separatist recite English poetry.
“Yes, it is,” my mother responded, wracking her brain as she
tried to remember which poet had said that. She thought
maybe it was Ezra Pound, the Nazi sympathizer, and that the
woman was making a veiled expression of anti-Semitism.Then
she quoted the poem back to the woman: “Winter kept us
warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow . . .”
The woman didn’t say anything else, continuing to stare at
the numbers as they descended from twenty-one; she got off
the elevator at the ground floor and smiled at my mother. At
this point in the telling, my mother’s voice would rise with the
satisfaction that she and the woman had shared a moment, a
literary bond. But later that night, well after midnight, the
woman, her husband, and my ersatz baby sister were dragging,
wheeling, and pushing all of their belongings across the hallway to the elevator in a caravan of suitcases, each one overstuffed and bulging, as pregnant with mystery as my mother
was with my imminent sibling. The woman was screaming at
her husband to hurry up, so loudly that she woke up several
families. Parents poked their heads out of steel doorways,
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Black Babies
blinking as they peered into the fluorescent hallway. Finally my
mother asked the woman to keep it down, since we were trying to sleep. I imagine that she asked sheepishly, cowed by her
chronic white guilt.
“Noise?” the woman yelled back as she pushed a shopping
cart full of overstuffed manila folders down the corridor. Her
eyes were as wide with adrenaline as they had been narrowed
with seething rage the month before. “The noise is your kid’s
Big Wheel going up and down, up and down the hallway all
day. Don’t tell me about noise.” Despite her reaction, the din
soon ebbed, and all that was left of the separatists was a quite
literal paper trail that led back to their apartment, whose
glossy, brown-painted door stood ajar. I don’t need my
mother’s storytelling to recall the open door. An open door in
that neighborhood was something strange and unusual. It usually meant something was seriously amiss—that a woman was
fleeing an abusive husband, that a robbery or even a murder
had taken place. For me, the open door came to have the same
association with death that a hat on a bed does for many
people.
Insomniac that she was, my mother stayed up and waited
eagerly for the sound of the newspaper dropping outside our
door. She savored her morning ritual, in which she brewed
dark-roast Bustello-brand Puerto Rican coffee to accompany
the Daily News.That morning my mother read in the paper that
the separatist group had taken credit for a bomb planted at the
Statue of Liberty the day before.The bomb had been defused,
but it still caused a panic among the tourists. Just as she was
5
reading that the FBI was searching for the members of the separatist group, the racket in the hallway started up again. She
peeked out, and there, as if arriving on cue, were the investigators from the FBI, identified by the large yellow letters on
the backs of their nylon jackets.Within an hour they, too, had
cleared out, padlocking the family’s door and pasting layer
upon layer of tape over it, yellow strips with black writing that
formed negatives of the jackets they had worn. The tape read
crime scene, do not enter—as if we had a choice. I was fascinated with this tape and peeled it off strip by strip when I
played in the hallway. My mother saved some for my room,
guessing correctly that I would like it after a few years, when I
understood what it meant. A couple of months later the padlock and tape came down, and a few weeks after that a Chinese
family moved in. We never saw the FBI again, and the FBI
never saw the separatists.
In retrospect, my baby-seizing mistake was understandable.
The idea that a brown-skinned baby couldn’t come from two
ashen parents wouldn’t have entered the mind of a two-and-ahalf-year-old. After all, a young child has not yet learned the
determinants of skin color, much less the fact that in America
families are for the most part organized by skin color. Moreover, in the projects people seemed to come in all colors,
shapes, and sizes, and I was not yet aware which were the important ones that divided up the world. At that age, the fact
that my parents were much bigger than me was of much
greater consequence that the fact that most of the other kids
my size had darker skin.
Honky
Black Babies
I even felt culturally more similar to my darker-hued peers
than to the previous generations of my own family. For one, I
didn’t talk like my parents, who had migrated to New York
from Pennsylvania and Connecticut. I spoke like the other kids
in the neighborhood. On the playground everyone pretty
much spoke the same language with the same unique accent,
no matter where our parents came from. While adults might
speak only Spanish, or talk with a heavy drawl if they came
from down South, our way of talking was like a layered cake; it
had many distinctly rich flavors, but in our mouths they all got
mixed up together. When we “snapped” on each other, little
did we know we were using the same ironic lilt and intonation
once employed in the Jewish shtetls of Central Europe. This
Yiddish-like English had mixed with influences from southern
Italians, Irish, and other immigrant groups to form the basic
New Yorkese of the mid-twentieth century. We spoke with
open vowels and dropped our rs: quarter was quartah, and water
was watah.To this European stew we added the Southern tendency to cut off the endings of some words—runnin’, skippin’,
jumpin’—a habit that came northward with many blacks during the Great Migration. We also turned our ts into ds, as in
“Lemme get fiddy cents.” The latest and most powerful influence was Puerto Rican. Within the Spanish-speaking world,
Puerto Ricans were notorious for their lazy rs, just as New
Yorkers were, so the fit was perfect. Whenever someone said
mira, the Spanish term for look, it came out media.
Although Spanish separated the native speakers from those
of us who picked it up on the playground, the presence of the
7
large Puerto Rican population had the opposite effect for me,
narrowing the racial rift between others and myself.Their various hues of tan and brown made my looks seem a matter of
degree rather than of kind, filling in the spectrum of color separating most of the black kids from me. It helped that I was not
entirely pale. My hair was as dark as that of anyone around. If
studied closely, my eyes betrayed brown shades around the interior of the iris, fanning out to green, but from afar they
looked no lighter than those of a lot of the kids. My skin tone
ranged from white to brownish depending on the time of year.
For all these reasons, I perceived skin color in particular and
race in general as something mutable, something that could
change with the seasons or with an extended trip back to
Puerto Rico. In this I was no different from scholars two centuries earlier who described “blackness” as a universal freckle
that would fade with time spent in the North or darken over
the course of generations in Africa.
While I may have been oblivious to race as a toddler, I certainly recognized gender differences. More than anything else,
I prayed for the baby to be a girl. As it turned out, I got my
wish.
8
two
ow did I, the child of two white artists, end up living in the
inner city—in the projects of 1969, no less? The short answer
is that we had no money. My mother liked to joke that she had
to “lie up” about our income to get food stamps. My father
worked part-time in an art supply store; my mother was a
graduate student at Empire State College. Despite our family’s
economic circumstances, we enjoyed a degree of choice about
where to live. My parents could have moved to a white,
working-class neighborhood in the outer boroughs or in New
Jersey, for example. Our neighbors, by contrast, were largely
unwelcome elsewhere for reasons of race and financial status.
It was this modicum of choice, not skin color per se, that ultimately distinguished us from our neighbors.
The long answer of how we ended up there lay in the same
tabloid paper that my mother scanned each morning with her
Bustello coffee, searching for news of local murders and rapes
of the day before. It was through an advertisement in the Daily
News that we all ended up living in the Masaryk Towers complex just south of Avenue D in Manhattan. In 1968, my parents
Trajectories
H
were living a few blocks north of the projects, in a tenement
apartment that had been broken into so many times they had
to chain their black-and-white television to the radiator. But
that didn’t protect them from one particular burglar. By
chance, my mother was standing outside the building and
looked up to see him climb through her window from the fire
escape. She ran to the corner and called the police, who arrived just as the crook came downstairs, his arms piled up with
whatever he thought he could sell. The cops threw him up
against the wall, then took him down to the Tombs, where they
held suspects to be arraigned. It turned out that the guy was a
junkie with seven prior arrests, but he still managed to pleabargain the charges from attempted robbery down to loitering. The judge gave him two weeks at Riker’s Island—two
days, apparently, for each prior.
Jonesing from a lack of drugs and facing the prospect of going cold turkey for two weeks in jail, he vented his anger at my
mother as the bailiff dragged him out of the courtroom.
“Lady,” he said, running his shackled hands through his stringy
blond hair, “when I get out, I’m going to get you.” He wiped
his runny nose onto the hair of his thick, tattooed arm and
added: “I know where you live, so I’m going to find you, and
then I’m going to kill you.” He spoke these menacing words
eloquently, as if he were preaching.
Whenever asked why we ended up in Masaryk Towers, my
mother would tell this story, describing every detail of the
burglar’s appearance, tone, and demeanor. Even when I was
just a few years old, I could sense her guilt at having moved the
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Tr a j e c t o r i e s
family to an unsafe neighborhood—and perhaps for having
taken an apartment slot from some more deserving family. She
told this story to reassure herself that the family had no choice
and had to act quickly, even if that wasn’t 100 percent true.
As the family lore goes, my parents had been talking about
renovating a loft in Soho. They had one already picked out, a
3,000-square-foot walkup in an iron-clad building on Spring
Street.The loft was selling for a few thousand dollars, since it
was completely raw space, but even that was beyond my parents’ means. They might have been able to borrow the down
payment from my mother’s parents, but they certainly never
would have qualified for a loan for the repairs necessary to
make it livable. Besides, my grandparents shared an ideology
against overt financial transfers to family members. My grandfather used to joke with my sister that he would buy her a car
when she graduated from college, any model she wanted.This
raised her suspicions, so she asked, “What about Dalton; will
you buy him a car, too?”
“No,” he answered. “I might still be alive when his comes
due, but I won’t be by the time you finish s…
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