Honky - Rilegato

Dalton Conley is Director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at NYU; he is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. He is author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (California, 1999).

"Americans have a tough time admitting two things about themselves: Race matters. Class matters. Dalton Conley's journey back and forth across the dividing lines invisibly etched on the map of Manhattan does with good story-telling what good sociology can't. He closes the sale. Through the eyes of a growing child he shows the difficulty of navigating without a map, the hard-won mastery of the unwritten rules. Young Dalton is bewildered by what most of us peers can't even perceive, the easy acceptance of white privilege. But instead of making a whiny tirade out of it, he makes us smell the street. It's a much more effective choice, if you ask me."—Ray Suarez, author of The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, and senior correspondent, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

"Honky is dope. For all you white kids that grew up in Hip-Hop dominated America, this book is for you. It's a hard honest look at why, no matter how poor and ghetto you are or want to be, as long as you're white, you've still got an advantage in this country. . .very brave."—Danny Hoch, producer and star of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop

"An eye-opening account of what it is like to grow up white in a black inner-city social environment. It is marvelously rich with insights--and a good read, too."—Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City.

"I love Honky -- Dalton Conley is a very clever fellow to have strip-mined material so close to home and come up with pure gold. Told within the narrative framework of a white boy's friendships in the minority projects where his liberal, artistic parents raised their family in conditions that came to resemble a fortress, this ruefully comic memoir of growing up fast in the city easily outdistances a dozen sociological treatises on the deep social clashes and warring values of our time."—Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape