What does it really mean to be white in America? Yale professor and author Dalton Conley has spent nearly his entire life studying this very question.
If there was ever someone most suited to study whiteness in America, it is Conley. Raised in the projects of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the '70s and '80s, Conley lived as one of few white children in a predominantly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood.
His new book, 'Honky,' is a memoir detailing his own coming-of-age in a world where he was the unlikely minority.
'I felt my own childhood was a natural experiment,' Conley said in an interview with The Daily Cardinal. 'If you take away all the obvious things about race and class, such as where they live or the money they make, you find out what being white and middle class really means.'
Conley's anecdotes in 'Honky' are no different than most American boys'he deals with bullies, makes new friends, goes to school and develops an uncanny obsession with video games. But all these stories swirl with underlying racial issues that slowly eat away at his youthful naivety.
The first story, for example, tells of how his longings for a baby sister once led him to swipe an African American baby from its carriage. His colorblind view of the child is both precious and dangerous.
'I was told, 'What are you doing? She's a black girl. She can't be your sister,'' Conley said.
With each new episode, Conley slowly unveils these unspoken racial boundaries all around him.
Gliding into first grade, Conley was placed in an entirely African American classroom, where he soon realized that he was the only student not hit by the teacher when he misbehaved. Already, his different treatment had begun. He was a white drop on a black canvas, yet Conley guiltily found his own skin color gave him special privileges he could not have expected.
But Conley's life lessons were not limited to race alone. Despite growing up poor, Conley's parents maintained what he calls the 'cultural capital' of middle class.
During his teen years, Conley became friends with a well-off Latino teen named Raphael. One day when left home alone, the boys' game with matches erupted into a devastating fire in Raphael's apartment. Once the smoke cleared, the authorities surprisingly did not seek criminal charges for the boys; instead, they left the families to deal with their sons. Conley knows that his dodge of the whip was due to his inherent social status.
'Poor minorities get no such allowances,' Conley observes in the book. 'But we were lucky for Raphael's family represented the right class and I the right race.'
This incident reflects a recurring theme in the book'the bent discipline and wavering power struggles between economic and racial groups. This, Conley reasons, is something that will always be an issue in the United States.
'The typical white family owns eight times the net wealth of one black family,' Conley said. '[White people] don't want to give up the power they already have. Why should they? In the future, whites will no longer be the majority, but they will likely still maintain the power, the privilege, and the wealth.'
As a kid, Conley bounded through life's hallmarks without much conscious thought of his position. But today Conley reflects upon his youth with careful respect and fresh social wisdom. His focus in his own teachings and in the book is 'to make the familiar strange, not the strange familiar.'
'One of the privileges of being white is that your race matters to you, but you don't have to think about it,' Conley said. 'Minorities, however, think about it in everything that they do.'
Conley tells his vivid stories with lively crispness and sweet, nostalgic humor. Intertwined with his youthful prose are moments of clear reflection that of a man who has seen his entire canvas. Although Conley absorbed his knowledge from real-life experiences, he is confident that readers everywhere can still share in his unique perspective.
'I would really like college students to read my book,' Conley said. 'They are not yet cynical and closed off to new ideas. Primarily, white college students would gain a lot from reading this. We have academic research to tell us social statistics, but this kind of narrative helps show on a personal level just how race matters in America.'
