'Honky' by Dalton Conley Essay

For example, in an article titled “Inequality, Race, and Remedy” for The American Prospect, Alan Jenkins states “Poor people of color are also increasingly more likely than whites to find themselves living in high-poverty neighborhoods with limited resources and limited options” (Jenkins). This illustrates that an individual’s race can completely affect their home, job, financial situation, and overall way of life. According to this article, person of color has a higher chance at living in poverty than a white person does. This example shows that colored people aren’t given as many opportunities and as a result, it may be harder for them to succeed in life. The oppression they face is all because of the color of their skin, not because they are any less smart or human than others. The poor lifestyle is a result of racial identification and false labeling. People automatically stereotype and judge black people because of their skin color and often times it has a negative outcome.

Often throughout the book she mentions that it is said that "you're paid what you're worth", saying that little pay results in you not being to good of a person. With that label they were looked down on and viewed kind of as untouchables. They had low pay, long hours, no overtime pay, and no benefits which leads to low socio-economic-status a job that no one wants to pursue. She stressed that poverty wasn’t a sustainable condition, it's a state of emergency. Citizens in the lower classes are left to fend for themselves and the ten, eight, or six dollar jobs are all that's there for them. What she would encourage them to do is to demand to be paid what they're worth because in the end they will be better off.

Reading the content in this book made me get a picture of what it was like to be a colored person in this time. My eyes were opened to the meaning of the word “nigga”. Nigga is such a derogatory term, yet now-a-days it is used by people so much. Kids in this generation use it as a term of endearment when they see their friends, or they say it when they are shocked by something. Frankly, I don’t believe they know how serious it really is. The fact that white people could look at a person and see less than a human being when they did nothing wrong distresses me. They (white people) treated them as if they were property and below them. Even though we don’t have racism to this extent

In Johnson’s “White Trash Primer,” Johnson tells the story of living on a farm, growing up in a poor family and going through hard times. Johnson tells how she overcomes the obstacles that she had to deal with in her life. This leaves the reader with the message that, no matter how hard life is, as long as you push through you will be able to do anything you set your mind to. The line “You hide that you are poor” (Johnson

In the novel House of the Scorpions by Nancy Farmer, the memoir, Where Am I Wearing by Kelsey Timmerman, and the short story The Scholarship Jacket by Martha Salinas, the common theme is that a person is always a person, no matter their wealth, their skin color, or even their birth circumstances. In the House of the Scorpions, an instance that shows this is when Matt finally listens to what all of his friends have been telling him, about how he is not inferior to them. Another example that accentuates the theme from Where Am I Wearing is where the reader learns about the terrible conditions Bangladeshi workers have to suffer through. A final example of the theme in The Scholarship Jacket is when Martha is denied the jacket because she’s poor and Mexican. A common theme similarly found in The House of the Scorpions by Nancy Farmer, The Scholarship Jacket by Martha Salinas, and Where Am I Wearing by Kelsey Timmerman is that everyone is human, no matter their financial status, ethnicity, not to mention circumstances of birth, and all deserve to be treated the same.

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.” –Richard Wright, Black Boy. The author suffered and lived through an isolated society, where books were the only option for him to escape the reality of the world. Wright wrote this fictionalized book about his childhood and adulthood to portray the dark and cruel civilization and to illustrate the difficulties that blacks had, living in a world run by whites.

From the beginning of the story, we are shown racial inequalities. Ellison introduces us to our character who is a broke and hungry African American economically struggling to save his lady friend’s, Laura’s, life. The protagonist “got no birth certificate to

Class disparities serve to isolate the impoverished from the bourgeois, this alienation exists because of class but Davis seeks to create this division by race. For example Hugh is worn down and “blackened by his hard labor.

Author and sociologist, Dalton Conley, is a Caucasian boy who grows up in a predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhood in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the 1970’s and 80’s. In his book, Honky, he tells us a unique view through a young boy’s eyes uncovering the way in which individuals are perceived in social reality, and how some groups of people are classified. He also speaks about how some groups get better opportunities and privileges then others. This book is a very powerful autobiography, according to his book, written by, “not your typical middle class white male.” (prologue, p. xiii) He goes on to say that he is middle class, even though his parents didn’t have any money and that he is a white boy, even though he grew up in an inner city housing project where mostly everyone was Black or Hispanic. Dalton speaks about his experience as a white boy exploring his definition of race and class and saying that, “race and class are nothing more than a set of stories we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality.” (prologue, p. xiv) He describes his childhood as 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.” (prologue, p. xiii)

Ewen then presents the reader with Ira Steward, a weaver and leader in the Massachusetts movement for and eight hour workday. Steward goes into further detail of the reason that the middle class felt the need to focus so much on their appearance. “To advertise one’s self destitute, is to be without credit, that tides so many in safety- to their standing in society- over the shallow places where ready resources fail” (qtd. in Ewen 192). Ewen uses Steward to explain that “the poor man is an unsuccessful man” (qtd. in Ewen 192). In America, we are judged by what we own. Being poor not only means that the person is unsuccessful but it is almost as if that person isn’t even a citizen. Keeping up an image that looks good is almost like buying your way into citizenship and acceptance. “The more expensive and superior style of living adopted by the middle classes must therefore be considered in the light of an investment, made from the soundest considerations of expediency- considering their risks and their chances-and from motives even of self preservation, rather than the mere desire for self indulgence.” (qtd. in Ewen 192). Ewen presents the idea that a person’s image

From the start the novel is laden with the pressures that the main characters are exposed to due to their social inequality, unlikeness in their heredity, dissimilarity in their most distinctive character traits, differences in their aspirations and inequality in their endowments, let alone the increasingly fierce opposition that the characters are facing from modern post-war bourgeois society.

This quote puts emphasis on the detail that everything in their world is bleak and plain. Their housing lacks creativity and color (something Martha Stewart would be very disappointed in). It also shows that as they grow older it doesn't get any better. This relates to their government's idea of a perfect utopia where everyone is equal. Therefore despite some are older and more experienced, they don't deserve any more than the younger people.

The most powerful quote in the book to me was “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves” (Diamond 25). This is what Diamond considers his ‘summary’ of the whole book. What he means is that despite people having the advantage of money, intelligence, time, physical attributes, that having the right environment is what really matters. It struck me because, as I said in the previous paragraph, I had no idea that being intelligent was as or equally as important as having a good environment

This experience was not unique to Wright, however; it was a reality felt by many blacks sharing his time and place. Wright was growing up in the Jim Crow era in the South, when, despite the North having won the Civil War, blacks had been successfully segregated by law and custom in “practically every conceivable situation in which whites and blacks might come into social contact”. This was a time when signs dictating where blacks could and could not walk, eat, live, and enter were everywhere, impacting the daily lives of black Americans and shaping their mannerisms to a huge degree. Wealth, skill, and personality did not matter; if one’s skin was black, one was subject to these laws and customs. Thus, skin color at this time was the most significant defining feature among Southern individuals with or without their consent, and by using the term “Black Boy” in his title, Wright drew attention to and challenged this unjust reality of race relations during his early years.

He acknowledges them as people being capable of only conventional sex and taste in arts and politics in comparison to the upper class who may take more eccentric approaches to these things (pg 59 ). Middle-class people do invest their money, but not as much as the upper-class. In his definition, the Working class people are ones who imagine they will be old by the time they are fifty. They don’t invest their money like the other two classes and can basically only see years into the future being able to help themselves and possibly their children (pg 60). Individuals in this class have less self-confidence in being able to make a difference in their family’s distant future, let alone the future of their community or the world (pg 60). Banfield’s definition of the lower class calls for a person who is basically the lowest of the low. This class of people is most prone to mental defect. They are present-orientated, living moment to moment, and they perpetuate their own misfortunes. He says lower class people believe, “things happen to him, he does not make them happen” (pg 61). Many of these individuals are unskilled and have low incomes, (although it is possible to have a high income and be of lower class in his opinion) this is at the root of their disadvantage. When looking at groups of people such as Black, Puerto Rican and