Author Dalton Conley

DATE November 26, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Dalton Conley talks about his memoir "Honky," about
growing up white in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Dalton Conley, has written a new memoir called "Honky." It's about
growing up white in a predominantly African-American and Latino housing
project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and what that taught him about race
and his own whiteness. Now studying race and class is his profession; he's a
sociologist who directs the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New
York University, and he's the author of an earlier book called, "Being Black,
Living in the Red: Race, Wealth and Social Policy in America."

Let's start with a short reading from the opening of Dalton Conley's memoir,
"Honky."

Professor DALTON CONLEY (Author, "Honky"): (Reads) "I'm 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
so-called `bad neighborhood.' Define whiteness by putting a light-skinned kid
in the midst of a community of color. If the exception proves the rule, I'm
that exception."

GROSS: Dalton Conley, you say in your book that you didn't realize that as a
white person, you were actually in the majority group and that it was
African-Americans who had been oppressed. What did it mean to you to be white
when you were very young?

Prof. CONLEY: Well, very young, initially, it didn't mean anything to me to be
white. I had to learn that having lighter skin than the people around me
meant something categorical, something different than, say, being taller or
shorter, or having blue eyes or brown eyes. I had to be taught that by the
society, the community around me. So...

GROSS: And when you did become aware of race, what did you think separated
you as a white person from the African-Americans and Latinos who you went to
school with?

Prof. CONLEY: Well, at very first, I thought, well, that means I can't really
be a part of this group completely, as much as I wanted to be, I couldn't be
totally accepted. But later on, I learned that, well, there's a consolation
prize for my particular situation in that I was belonging to a dominant group
in society. I had privileges and power that the people around me didn't have.

GROSS: What were the privileges and power that you realized you had?

Prof. CONLEY: Well, one of the first instances of this privilege or power that
I experienced was ironically provided by my local public school. The board of
education, which we'd like to think is supposed to be one of the more
color-blind institutions in society and provide, you know, equal opportunity
for all, was the first, most memorable lesson of what race means to me, in
that in my first class, I was the only white kid in an otherwise
African-American class and not coincidentally, I was the only kid not struck
by the teacher. She used corporal punishment on all the other kids with her
ruler up at the front of the room.

And when my mother came to investigate why this was occurring--I had started
having tics and facial twitches in a very visible manifestation of white
guilt--and my mother came in to find what was going on, and she found out that
the other parents had requested corporal punishment, and this African-American
teacher had known, or thought that white parents, quote, "spoil their
children," so she would never dare to cross the racial line and hit me as
well.

GROSS: How much of your identity as a child was based on being the white kid
in the school?

Prof. CONLEY: It was constant for me. You know, the sense that once I did
learn that this whiteness was different from any other physical distinction
that marked anyone in our school, it became my identity. I was the white kid,
I was the honky in the school, and that wasn't necessarily bad. That meant
that, you know, if I acted weird, if I had my facial tics, I sort of had a
built-in excuse. Well, I was different, I was the white kid, and, well, maybe
all white kids twitched and blinked compulsively, so I didn't feel so
personally responsible for all of my own idiosyncrasies. But it definitely
dominated my life. That identity dominated my life more than anything else:
religion, ethnicity, even class at that point.

GROSS: One of the points that you make in your book, that most white kids
growing up in a neighborhood that has a lot of other white kids in it don't
really define themselves as being white. They just kind of take that as a
given.

Prof. CONLEY: Right. I mean, I run into a lot of people who ask me, `Do
whites even have a culture? What does it mean to be white?' And, in fact, I
do an experiment with my sociology students at the university where I as them
on the first day of Intro Soc to write down five characters to describe
themselves, and I can almost predict to a person that the minorities in the
crowd will have put their race at or near the top of the list, but the whites
didn't even think of it. They might have put Polish or Italian or some sort
of national origin or ethnic identity at the top of the list, but they will
never put `Caucasian' or `white' or `Euro-American.'

Belonging to this racial category is not something that whites think about,
and I think that that's, again, one of the privileges of whiteness,
ironically, that we don't have to think about--or don't want to think about
the power of race in our lives, because if we did acknowledge that being white
mattered, that our position of relative comfort and advantage vis-a-vis other
groups on society was because of the history of race and belonging to this
particular category, we'd have to admit, then, that there's a causal
relationship between that and the relative disadvantage of others, and we'd
rather think that we are where we are, in our relative position, because of
individual characteristics, say, skill or hard work, or even luck, but not
because of these overall social and historical forces.

GROSS: Were there things that you picked up on from your African-American
friends that are considered, you know, black ways of speaking or black dialect
or black ways of dressing, that you didn't think of being racially specific in
one way or another?

Prof. CONLEY: For sure, when I eventually started commuting to the white side
of town, to the--Greenwich Village, Manhattan--to a rich school, and I had to
learn a whole new way of interacting with people there, because, for example,
in my neighborhood for a long time. You didn't hold eye contact because that
was considered confrontational, and you had to show respect and deference to
people around you, and that was the norm. Meanwhile, on the other side of
town, if I didn't look someone in the eye and hold eye contact when I was
talking to them, that was considered rude, and I had to learn that, oh, I'm
over here. I'm supposed to do it this way, differently than I did at home.

GROSS: What about the way you spoke and the way you dressed, the music you
listened to?

Prof. CONLEY: Yeah. I quickly learned to put on a different face, whether I
was over on the West Side of town or back in my neighborhood. But eventually,
I think it all mellowed into one. I toned down my snapping on the West Side
of town, and I retreated, increasingly, from the community back at home.

In terms of dress, everything I wore was a hand-me-down from a kid up in
Pennsylvania who lived next door to my grandmother, whose name was Jeff Frye,
and so I had not much choice in my clothing. In fact, everything I wore had
the label `Jeff Frye' sewn into it, so my mother used to joke that if they
ever found me after an accident, they'd call the wrong family, but--or that
Jeff Frye was like a new designer label to me. So I wore standard Sears
clothing, and that sort of didn't help me fit in back in my neighborhood and
didn't help me fit in among the rich kids of the Greenwich Village, either.

In terms of music, again, I was sort of a nerd, which is a dominant identity.
And that meant that most of the music I listened to happened to be coming to
me from other people's radios. And back then, boom box radios had taken over
the public space back in my neighborhood. And there was disco flowing out and
R&B and soul at all hours, really loudly, so much that it would float up to
the 21st floor where we lived at the very top floor of our building. And I
could hear Anita Ward's "Ring My Bell" continuously for what seemed like six
months to a year over and over again. And then I could go to the Greenwich
Village, and I didn't hear music at all on that side of town. It was much
more quiet.

GROSS: My guest is Dalton Conley. His memoir is called "Honky." We'll talk
more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dalton Conley and he's written
a memoir called "Honky," about growing up in a neighborhood that was
predominantly African-American and Latino. And he was one of the few white
kids there. Conley is also a sociologist. He teachers at NYU and he writes
about race and class as a sociologist, as well.

Why did your parents move to a housing project in Manhattan in 1968; a housing
project where, as a white family, they were going to be very much in the
minority? And 1968, the year they moved, was the year before you were born.

Prof. CONLEY: Mm-hmm. Now most people when they hear that, `Oh, you grew up
in the inner city and amongst all these housing projects. Your parents must
have been political. They must have been Communist or labor organizers or
housing activists, and they moved there out of the political agenda.' Nothing
could have been farther than--from the truth. They thought, actually, it was
a quite--almost suburban environment. They had been trying to make it as an
artist and a writer, respectively; my dad as a painter and my mother as a
novelist. And they were living in a kind of walk-up tenement apartment about
a half a mile from where we ended up living. And they had been robbed so
many times, that they had their television chained to the radiator. And one
time, they came in and they caught the guy red-handed. The police came and
arrested him, and as he was being carted off to jail, he claimed that he was
going to come back and kill them in revenge. Now whether or not that was
true or not, my mother took that seriously and said, `We've got to move and
we've got to move now.'

So they claim that this opportunity to move into the subsidized housing unit
was the best opportunity at that time. My father actually resisted it because
he thought it was too bourgeois, too suburban-like and not Bohemian enough for
him. Because of the sort of standard, cookie-cutter-like apartments, he
thought it was the urban equivalent of Levittown. And he relented, though,
and agreed to my mom that they had to move. And there we were.

Now as an adult sociologist, I know a different story that they had a lot of
choices. I think my mother liked to think she had no choice because it
helped her guilt for having raised her kids in a very high-risk neighborhood
with lots of violence and drugs, etc., but I think she did have a lot of
choices back in 1968. And that distinguished us from our neighbors around us.
And even before I was born, my life was different in that my parents could
have moved to, say, a white, working-class neighborhood in the outer
boroughs, which my neighbors, because of racial antagonism, couldn't have.
They could have moved back to Carbondale, Pennsylvania, where my mother grew
up, and lived with her parents, who were solidly middle class, and given up
the idea of being in New York to be a writer and an artist, but they didn't do
that either. Most of the people around us were already living with their
grandmother.

They could have gotten a job; made more efforts to get a full-time, regular
job, which they might have had some struggles, but they certainly would have
had an easier time than the people around us. So even before I was born, my
situation was quite different than the people around me.

GROSS: How did your parents feel, do you think, about bringing up their
children, you and your sister, in a neighborhood that was becoming
increasingly unsafe? You know, there was a family nearby that was murdered.
When you were in junior high school, your good friend was shot in the neck
and paralyzed. Because it was such a tough neighborhood, you studied karate,
and your karate teacher was shot and killed. So, you know, it wasn't a safe
place.

Prof. CONLEY: No, not at all. And my mother's worries about safety
approached almost a feverish pitch. She had all these computer-like
algorithms that she programmed into my sister and my head in order to prevent
us from having something terrible happen. For example, we had specific
instructions of how to answer the steel door to our apartment. She sewed
money into my clothes or put it under the inner sole of my shoes, $5 bills,
so that--it was called mugging money. And I was supposed to never argue with
anybody who mugged me and just hand them the money. She'd read too many New
York Post headlines about a teen-ager killed for $2, so that had I been
walking down the street in the 1970s or '80s and had you run into me then and
asked for $5, I would have just handed it to you. I was so programmed to
just give money to anyone who demanded it from me until I caught on, of
course, and then spent it myself on comic books and candy and video games.
But she went through all these creative extents to try to regulate our
safety.

She made us sign contracts so that we would have a free trip to the 99 Cent
store, one of those discount stores where she said, `Price was no object,' and
she would let us pick out anything at the 99 Cent store if we signed a
contract saying we wouldn't, for example, lean over the edge of the subway
platform or ride on the backs of buses, as was a local sport, to grab onto the
back of a bus and surf it, so to speak.

GROSS: What...

Prof. CONLEY: So she went through lots of efforts to try to ensure our
safety in an increasingly unsafe neighborhood.

GROSS: But what about you, when you were growing up? Were you afraid a lot
of the time? Were you strong? Could you hold your own if somebody picked a
fight with you?

Prof. CONLEY: I was definitely a nerd of the neighborhood, but I developed a
certain savvy, given that, to sort of avoid situations that would have gotten
me in trouble. It didn't always work, but I was fear--I was afraid a lot of
the times. I used to do the laundry in the basement, and there were people
lurking in the basement and not just--and I wasn't just imagining it. I
would run up to the first floor and wait for the elevator on the ground
floor. If I saw somebody on the elevator that I didn't like the look of, I
would just pretend it was going the wrong direction and wait. If I had to
walk up the stairs, the windowless stairs of the 21 flights, I was just
terrified, especially since, on a lot of flights, the lights were out and I'd
have to traverse it in pure darkness. So the fear level would rise and fall.

I had always thought that I was safe in my apartment behind the steel door,
but then one time when we were out, someone tied the fire hose on the roof to
the railing and swung into the open window in our kitchen and robbed us. That
totally shattered my sense of our apartment as a fortress or a security
blanket. And we closed the window and locked it and thought, `Well, that will
solve that.' And later on when we were gone again, he crashed through the
window and left a little bit of a bloody trail and robbed us again. So for a
long time, that really made me feel like I had no security whatsoever. We
eventually had to have bars installed on the window because we didn't know
what else to do, so that was becoming the metaphor for my increasing
estrangement from my local community in that we lived 21 flights off the
ground, yet had to have bars on our window.

GROSS: Now you eventually transferred to a school in Greenwich Village; a
school that--I think you described it as a wealthier school before?

Prof. CONLEY: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Was it a pretty middle-class school or upper-class school?

Prof. CONLEY: Well, it ranged from middle class to upper class. That was
one of the most shocking distinctions to me when I got there was in my old
school in the local neighborhood, PS 4, everyone was more or less at the
same economic status. Some people were on welfare. Some people were on food
stamps. Some people had parents that were working full time. Some people
didn't. But more or less, you were working class or poor.

Over on the West Side of town, there was a whole range of class statuses that
I had no idea even existed. And it was very shocking to me in the initial
days I was there that, for example, some of the kids were--the nerdiest kids
were the most popular kids. I didn't get what was going on. It had been like
I entered a twilight zone or an alternate universe. Back at my school in my
neighborhood, you were popular if you brought something to the table or to the
playground; if you were a good snapper and really humorous or if you were fast
or if you were big and strong. It was about your individual characteristics.

Over there on the West Side of town, where the range was from middle class on
up, I noticed that, `Oh, it doesn't matter if you're a nerd or if you can't
snap or if you're not particularly good in sports, it matters what your
parents do or how rich you are.' Only by spending time in kids' apartments
or houses after school did I realize where the hierarchy within school, the
popularity pecking order, came from. One kid had an entire lower-level to his
brownstone that was his that was a rec room and had an entire closet of cans
of Coca-Cola. Now he was the most popular kid in school, no matter what
characteristics he had. So there was a whole language of classes that I was
learning on the West Side of town.

GROSS: How did your identity finally change when you went from being, like,
virtually the only white kid to being one of many?

Prof. CONLEY: I think that was a tough transition in that I had relied on my
whiteness as an excuse for a lot of things. If I wasn't good at sports or if
I wasn't particularly good at snapping or if I wasn't as cool as the kids
around me, it was because I was white. I could rely on this sort of group
identity to excuse my own behavior, but when I moved to the West Side of town
and realized that I wasn't fitting in there, either, I couldn't rationalize
to myself anymore that it was because of my skin color or because of race. I
had to accept that, `Well, maybe it's because of me.' There's something
unique about me that made me not quite fit in anywhere. And that was quite a
shock to me.

GROSS: What'd you make of that?

Prof. CONLEY: Like any teen-age kid, I first just developed defense
mechanisms, saying, I hated these kids over on the West Side of town and I
wanted to be back with my people down on the Lower East Side. And they're not
cool. They don't know how to snap and diss. They don't know how to do this.
And, of course, now I realize that that was defensiveness and feeling put upon
myself. And looking back, I still think that it was partly because of race
and class that I was feeling such an outsider on both sides of the fence
because, unlike kids who lived their lives on one side of the invisible line
that divided Manhattan, I had to cross lines and, therefore, didn't feel
integrated into either community.

For example, I brought home a kid one day from my rich school back home. And
I was so embarrassed at him because he had long, straight, blonde hair. He
walked bouncing up and down in a totally untough way. He wore sandals. He
was a hippy kid. And I was afraid they were going to think we were gay. And
I was simultaneously afraid that he was going to think, `What kind of pigsty
does Dalton live in?' because there was needles lying on the ground. There
was broken glass everywhere. There was graffiti and garbage pouring out
everywhere. I tried to shuffle him straight from the school bus into my
building, and he got distracted by a pile of electronics parts and said, `Wow,
we can build a crystal radio. We can do anything.' And all the other kids
crowded around and said, `Oh, can you build a laser? Can you build this? Can
you build that?' And he was totally unself-conscious and fit in, even though
I thought that they would have beat the hell out of him and not accept him.
And it was my own self-consciousness that had prevented me, largely, from
fitting in anywhere.

GROSS: Well, Dalton Conley, I want to thank you very much for talking with
us.

Prof. CONLEY: Thanks, Terry.

GROSS: Dalton Conley is the author of the memoir "Honky." He directs the
Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, growing up the son of a truck stop prostitute. We meet
J.T. LeRoy, a 21-year-old writer who is already the author of a novel and a
collection of short stories based on his experiences. His novel, "Sarah," is
being adapted into a film by Gus Van Sant.

(Soundbite of music)

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