I included the photo above to symbolize the light that books can bring into our lives and the way they can illuminate our visions of the world around us, brightening our understanding of different topics or experiences. That is what this book has done for me.
For my book project, I read “Honky” by Dalton Conley. This book opened my eyes. I found it insightful and I left feeling more grateful for the blessings of where I grew up and the for the benefits I know that I have simply for being a white, middle-class Christian. The stories really brought home some key concepts. As I have looked back over the book, I have realized that while I originally intended to review the stories, themes, and disruptions in chronological order, I believe that it may be more impactful to over these by topic, as the themes were threaded throughout the book. Nevertheless, I accept that there may be no best way to organize this all. The fact of the matter is, I almost want to organize it into both because so many of these themes weave together.
Below, I have listed themes along with quotes and reactions to parts throughout the book. At the bottom, there is another section with insightful quotes which I felt may not have related well enough to a particular theme to place it in one.
Language
There’s an old saying that you never really know your own language until you study another. It’s the same with race and class. (xii)
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 different flavors, but in our mouths, they all got mixed up together. When we “snapped” on each other, little id we know that 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 Yorkee of the mid-twentieth century. We spoke with open vowels and dropped our rs… To this European stew we added the Southern tendency to cut off endings of some words... a habit that came northward with many blacks during the Great Migration. We also turned ours ts into ds… (7)
It was interesting to read this and think of what I have been learning in both my language development and literacy development classes. The area in which we grow up and the people with whom we associate impact our vocabulary and our language, whether it be the actual language or the dialect, accent, or pragmatics with which we talk influences the way we view the world and interact with it.
Education
Although my grandfather had gotten to his position without the benefit of much formal schooling – a feat that was still possible in his generation – he was obsessed with education. (31)
In our day even more than when this book took place, education is critical to our place in the social ladder later in life. Unfortunately, student growing up in poverty are not only less likely to go to college for lack of sufficient financial aid, but are also less likely to graduate high school. With little education, they are limited in their jobs and end up stuck in the lower class. In turn, their children end up in the same situation and the problems persist for generations. As a teacher, I hope to do my part to instill an understanding of the importance of education and help motivate kids to appreciate learning so that they might at least graduate and perhaps be able to qualify for scholarships which make college possible.
“my mother learned from a friend that the Board of Education did not require much in the way of proof of one’s address to verify a child’s school district. She could tell them she lived in the Empire State Building and, as long as she could get mail there and respond to immunization notices, lice alerts, and other school correspondence, no would ever be the wiser. It was even the case, she learned, that after October 1 she could switch my address back to the projects and, since the school year would already be under way, the Board of Education could not force me to return to my local school. What’s more, once October rolled around, my adopted school was legally required – thanks to the liberal New York State courts – to send a bus to pick me up and take me home. (52)
As a teacher, I need to take into account where kids may live when it comes to after school activities and time and events which require or are impacted by transportation.
The they who made up these policies were, on the surface, quite different in character from the they who stole car radios or cut of the peckers of my classmates at the Mini School… Beneath the surface, however, these state behemoths were no different in nature from the spirits who stole; they were just as arbitrary, random, and mysterious. One rule said you had to go to school where you lived; another said that where you “lived” was your choice. One law gave extra money to underfunded school districts; another took it away and gave it to better-off districts. It seemed possible to get whatever you wanted as long as you knew the magic words and when to say them. It was through such a spell that I was propelled off the life trajectory shared by other neighborhood kids and catapulted into New York’s middle and upper classes. (53)
This quote really shows the impact of education and the impact of association. Unfortunately, schools in lower-class areas are not known for being as good. This concerns me grately and makes me want to do more to make sure that this changes in time, that we might be able to better fund these schools. Unfortunately, people are selfish and even I, myself, am selfish and we need to be more charitable in order to do what is necessary for this to occur.
Race
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-a-half-year-old. After all, a young child has not yet learned the determinants of skin color, much less the fact that in America families for the most part are organized by skin color. (6)
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. (8)
It bothers me that babies and young children may appear to be oblivious to race, or at least I have seen that portrayed many times, and that over time, we teach it to them. I wonder where it all began and I wonder how to stop a process and way of thinking that has gone on for so long. It makes me think about how racism is taught. I believe it is often little by little, in perhaps subtle ways. I feel a little conflicted with how these ideas align with various ideas of this problem though. It is said that everyone is at least a little racist, regardless of their own race. I believe this. This knowledge makes me question how this came to be. Is this innate? A fear of differences which may have been breed into us through the course of time and evolution for our own well being? Perhaps in the early days people afraid of differences were more likely to survive because it protected them from other tribes. Perhaps it has also been passed down through the generations because of the way parents taught due to an inherent fear or one more justified. If it is genetic, it would not make sense for children to be immune to racist thoughts or behaviors, unless it took more time for the gene to develop or kick in. The fact that it doesn’t develop till later suggests it may not be inherent, but simply passed generation to generation by the way children are taught. As a teacher, I need to be aware of the subtleties of this problem so that I can do my best to avoid promoting racism.
For my mother’s family there was no such thing as class, but they did harbor some primordial notion of race: Jewish and other. (23)
I feel like this statement captures pretty well the concept of racism. It is us against the world. It can be difficult to overcome because despite the changes over time, we still have survival instincts and these are meant to help us survive. While being friendly to others can create connections which help us to progress and have accesses to resources and knowledge which can help us, selfishness is also appealing because we see it as trying to save ourselves. Unfortunately, this divides people and creates conflict and more danger and more problems. I fear that racism may be something bred into us in a way, even if it has more to do with differences and seeking to belong and be accepted than it does with race and somehow we have to overcome this or make progress towards it so that we can live a better way.
It didn’t take more than one or two lessons like this to drive home the meaning of race to my sister. Race was not something mutable, like a freckle or hairstyle; it defined who looked like whom, who was allowed in the group and who wasn’t. (42)
The main character’s sister learned race at a young age by two key experiences.
The first was with Barbies in preschool, gifts for the children distributed according to race. Since she was the only white girl, she had the only real Barbie and everyone else wanted it. While I could see how teachers may have been wanting to let kids have a doll they could relate to, it also created issues that they could not have the doll they wanted, they had no choice (just as we have no choice in our race). At the same time, one of the most upsetting parts may be the fact that the main Barbie is white. That said, with more white people in the population of the United States, it makes sense in a capitalist society that there would be more products directed towards white people. Nevertheless, this makes things unfair and perhaps there should not be a main one, but a group.
The second event related to her hair. Surrounded by African Americans for the most part and having a best friend who happened to be of that race, Alexandra wanted to have cornrows. With different hair though, she was made fun of and never tried again. This is difficult because we do have differences so there will be differences in styles and yet, we do not want to be exclusionary.
I was the only one who escaped the yardstick – and not, I knew even at the time, because I was particularly well behaved. Everyone involved, teacher and students, took it for granted that a black teacher would never cross the racial line to strike a white student. (46)
I found out that everyone else had been born in the year of the dog, 1970, while I – the ostensible first-grader among them – was born in the year of the rooster, 1969. The kids chuckled to themselves, but their laughter did not wound me the way the snaps of some of the black kids had. This, I would later realize, captured the essential difference between race and ethnicity. It would have seemed absurd if the black teacher had tried to integrate me into that class. Racial groupings were about dominion and struggles for power; what’s more, race barriers were taken as both natural and insurmountable./But in the Chinese class, eventually I began to feel I was part of the student community. (50)
By the time I left the Mini School I had learned what the concept of race meant. I now knew that, based on the color of my skin, I would be treated a certain way, where that entailed not getting rapped across the knuckles, not having a name like everyone else, or not having the same kind of hair as my best friend Some kids got unique treatment for being taller or heavier than everyone else, but being whiter than everyone else was a different matter altogether. Teachers usually did a good job of ignoring the fact that one kid was shorted than another or another was fatter, but it was they, not the other students, who made my skin color an issue The kids only picked up on the adult cues and then reinterpreted them. Moreover, height, weight, and other physical characteristics were relative states. But being white was constructed as a matter of kind, not degree. Either you were black, or you weren’t. Some of the kids in my original first-grade class were blancitos – lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans – but that didn’t mean that they got rapped on the knuckles any softer than the darker-skinned kids. Once you weren’t a blanco, it didn’t matter what your skin color was in P.S. 4. (53-54)
p. 43-45,_: separate classrooms by race
corporal punishment – not being whacked
being afraid of going to the bathroom
Chinese class – only student who did not receive a different name
This was a lesson not only about class but about the status of immigrants. Back in my neighborhood, it didn’t really seem to make much difference whether someone’s family had been in New York for a while or had just arrived from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic… we took Hispanic kids on their own terms, even absorbed some of their language and customs. Ozan, by contrast, seemed to carry the mark of foreignness with him through the halls of P.S. 41. It wasn’t about race, for he appeared as white as anyone else. It might have been about ethnicity, since his name certainly set him off from the rest of us. But the major division between Ozan and everyone else was of his own making: his political opinions, almost as a rule, diverged from those of the rest of the class. I found myself swayed by his intelligence and eloquent arguments on many occasions, but I resisted falling into his camp sine it would have meant ostracizing myself. (73)
music choices – white v. blacks
playing with fire – symmetry meant he threw a match which wasn’t burnt down – friend’s loft damaged – let off with no punishment
Class
Every few blocks the brown-bricked dwellings changed in name and only slightly in style… One structure might be a story or two taller than the adjacent one or have bricks a shade darker, but otherwise the buildings looked exactly alike, and they remained the same over the course of decades… There was never any new construction or renovation. And since the buildings were brick, there was never even a new coat of paint. The projects constituted a static monument to the social policy of their time. (13)
The housing complex had its own security force, was funded by its own government grant, and was managed by a nonprofit corporation instead of the city, all of which my mother found encouraging. Little did she know the security guards would do little to stop the violence in our buildings – cops getting shot in the elevator, hostages being taken in the pharmacy, girls getting raped in the stairwell. (14)
The flower box movement had embodied the notion that poverty was primarily an aesthetic problem. If we could just spruce things up a bit, we’d all have more hope; we might even become middle class. But by 19668 every surface in our neighborhood was covered by graffiti…perhaps because they were the most visible marker of urban blight, graffiti scrawlings, more than crime or drugs or family breakup, were what embarrassed me when I brought friends home from other areas of the city. It was four-color, in-your-face poverty. (20-21)
I was beginning to realize that eah student possessed a ense of elf-worth that translated into a certain position on the social ladder. Only much later did I realize that school dynamics and one’s sense of self-worth could not be isolated from family background. It was no oincidene, I would learn, that the most popular kids tended to be those wwhoe parents were the ricjest or mot powerful or held the most prestigious jobs. In my old school rhere had been no suh hierarchy of which I was aware – probably because no one’s parents were rich, powerful, or prestigious in any sense of the word. There, each kid invented his own place in the social network. The pecking order was, as best I could tell, determined primarily by brute force, by who could beat up whom. Other qualities mattered too, like athletic prowess, ability to snap, and overall sense of humor. (76)
needing to be smart to be accepted – a new culture of what is cool and acceptable
political importance – doughnuts for those who rooted for Carter
In society overall it may be that those who are in control have a larger voice, the ability to fil up the newspapers and airwaves with their opinions; but on the day-to-day level of the schoolyeard it was the less powerful who spoke more, clamoring to be heard by the reserved, better-off kids, who seemed to quietly pass judgement. (82)
This at of honesty appeared merely ritualistic to me, canned confession and punishment delivered with the aura that pervades the criminal justice system of oppressive dictatorship where the outcome is always prefigured. (87)
Rude sexual comments/jokes from other kids about his mom really bother me
assignments to go grocery shopping
food stamps v. real money
different foods
kinds of books/literacy available
absence of diversity
being embarrassed of his home because of the neighborhood it was in
street smarts that come from living in a bad area – didn’t lie, kid was nice when he acted innocent and oblivious
being barred from participating in the shopping other kids did
stealing – getting away with it
mugger money
getting paid – learning the incentive to work
Race and Class together
Race and class are nothing more than a set of stories we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality. (xii)
Fear
Crime and violence were not uncommon in our area, but they always seemed to happen elsewhere and, I believe, could be avoided, like the beer bottles falling from the sky. Even the castrations at school didn’t feel like a personal threat, I merely had to avoid the bathrooms to avoid danger. But the prospect of someone crashing through our twenty-first-floor window was frightening on another level. It meant I was not even safe in my own bed, not even behind our locked double-steel front door. In short, there was nothing I could do to escape risk. (59)
In retrospect, manhunt was not a strange game for us to be playing. Unlike baseball or football, it taught us important skills for life in the “ghetto.” It trained the hunted to evade both criminals and the police, who in that neighborhood were deemed equivalent. And it socialized the hunters to adopt a posse mentality, one that would become institutionalized among those who joined the local gang, The Junior Outlaws. (62)
Though I had moved up a rank in the karate hierarchy, my association with Rahim did not achieve the intended purpose of making me feel safer and more secure in the neighborhood, and for a simple reason: within a year Rahim was shot and killed. Evidently, even a black belt did little against a gun; in fact, it may have been a detriment. (64)
Somehow I had already developed a keen sense that crime and violence in our neighborhood were not random at all but followed certain patterns. The great dangerous they who committed crimes were neither unthinking nor uncalculating. (66)
It didn’t help that my father wouldn’t tell me definitely what had happened or that no one was ever prosecuted or even arrested or the crime. This lack of resolution gave me my first unsettling taste of powerlessness in the face of uncertainty… Before it, there were lies and there was truth, but I always knew which was which and figured others did as well. But in this case, no one would ever know what really happened; it was merely a matter of what eah individual chose to believe. There were two truth, and there were none. (66)
dressing up as policemen to rob and murder à don’t know who to trust
being broke into on the 21st floor – bars on windows – not feeling safe
Sean – on Sesame Street, was more empowered and popular – pulled a knife on him one day
Other
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. (5)
My mother’s misreading of signs was not limited to text. Frequently she got quite involved with men before they would confess to her that they were gay. (30)
His obliviousness was the opposite of my mother’s: whereas she was prone to see things that weren’t there, he was likely not to notice things that were. Both adaptions would serve them well in the inner city, where my mother maintained a vigilant and healthy dose of paranoia and where my father often had to step over unconscious junkies splayed out in the street or ignore bleating sirens as he walked my sister and me to and from school each day. (34-35)
For my book project, I read “Honky” by Dalton Conley. This book opened my eyes. I found it insightful and I left feeling more grateful for the blessings of where I grew up and the for the benefits I know that I have simply for being a white, middle-class Christian. The stories really brought home some key concepts. As I have looked back over the book, I have realized that while I originally intended to review the stories, themes, and disruptions in chronological order, I believe that it may be more impactful to over these by topic, as the themes were threaded throughout the book. Nevertheless, I accept that there may be no best way to organize this all. The fact of the matter is, I almost want to organize it into both because so many of these themes weave together.
Below, I have listed themes along with quotes and reactions to parts throughout the book. At the bottom, there is another section with insightful quotes which I felt may not have related well enough to a particular theme to place it in one.
Language
There’s an old saying that you never really know your own language until you study another. It’s the same with race and class. (xii)
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 different flavors, but in our mouths, they all got mixed up together. When we “snapped” on each other, little id we know that 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 Yorkee of the mid-twentieth century. We spoke with open vowels and dropped our rs… To this European stew we added the Southern tendency to cut off endings of some words... a habit that came northward with many blacks during the Great Migration. We also turned ours ts into ds… (7)
It was interesting to read this and think of what I have been learning in both my language development and literacy development classes. The area in which we grow up and the people with whom we associate impact our vocabulary and our language, whether it be the actual language or the dialect, accent, or pragmatics with which we talk influences the way we view the world and interact with it.
Education
Although my grandfather had gotten to his position without the benefit of much formal schooling – a feat that was still possible in his generation – he was obsessed with education. (31)
In our day even more than when this book took place, education is critical to our place in the social ladder later in life. Unfortunately, student growing up in poverty are not only less likely to go to college for lack of sufficient financial aid, but are also less likely to graduate high school. With little education, they are limited in their jobs and end up stuck in the lower class. In turn, their children end up in the same situation and the problems persist for generations. As a teacher, I hope to do my part to instill an understanding of the importance of education and help motivate kids to appreciate learning so that they might at least graduate and perhaps be able to qualify for scholarships which make college possible.
“my mother learned from a friend that the Board of Education did not require much in the way of proof of one’s address to verify a child’s school district. She could tell them she lived in the Empire State Building and, as long as she could get mail there and respond to immunization notices, lice alerts, and other school correspondence, no would ever be the wiser. It was even the case, she learned, that after October 1 she could switch my address back to the projects and, since the school year would already be under way, the Board of Education could not force me to return to my local school. What’s more, once October rolled around, my adopted school was legally required – thanks to the liberal New York State courts – to send a bus to pick me up and take me home. (52)
As a teacher, I need to take into account where kids may live when it comes to after school activities and time and events which require or are impacted by transportation.
The they who made up these policies were, on the surface, quite different in character from the they who stole car radios or cut of the peckers of my classmates at the Mini School… Beneath the surface, however, these state behemoths were no different in nature from the spirits who stole; they were just as arbitrary, random, and mysterious. One rule said you had to go to school where you lived; another said that where you “lived” was your choice. One law gave extra money to underfunded school districts; another took it away and gave it to better-off districts. It seemed possible to get whatever you wanted as long as you knew the magic words and when to say them. It was through such a spell that I was propelled off the life trajectory shared by other neighborhood kids and catapulted into New York’s middle and upper classes. (53)
This quote really shows the impact of education and the impact of association. Unfortunately, schools in lower-class areas are not known for being as good. This concerns me grately and makes me want to do more to make sure that this changes in time, that we might be able to better fund these schools. Unfortunately, people are selfish and even I, myself, am selfish and we need to be more charitable in order to do what is necessary for this to occur.
Race
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-a-half-year-old. After all, a young child has not yet learned the determinants of skin color, much less the fact that in America families for the most part are organized by skin color. (6)
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. (8)
It bothers me that babies and young children may appear to be oblivious to race, or at least I have seen that portrayed many times, and that over time, we teach it to them. I wonder where it all began and I wonder how to stop a process and way of thinking that has gone on for so long. It makes me think about how racism is taught. I believe it is often little by little, in perhaps subtle ways. I feel a little conflicted with how these ideas align with various ideas of this problem though. It is said that everyone is at least a little racist, regardless of their own race. I believe this. This knowledge makes me question how this came to be. Is this innate? A fear of differences which may have been breed into us through the course of time and evolution for our own well being? Perhaps in the early days people afraid of differences were more likely to survive because it protected them from other tribes. Perhaps it has also been passed down through the generations because of the way parents taught due to an inherent fear or one more justified. If it is genetic, it would not make sense for children to be immune to racist thoughts or behaviors, unless it took more time for the gene to develop or kick in. The fact that it doesn’t develop till later suggests it may not be inherent, but simply passed generation to generation by the way children are taught. As a teacher, I need to be aware of the subtleties of this problem so that I can do my best to avoid promoting racism.
For my mother’s family there was no such thing as class, but they did harbor some primordial notion of race: Jewish and other. (23)
I feel like this statement captures pretty well the concept of racism. It is us against the world. It can be difficult to overcome because despite the changes over time, we still have survival instincts and these are meant to help us survive. While being friendly to others can create connections which help us to progress and have accesses to resources and knowledge which can help us, selfishness is also appealing because we see it as trying to save ourselves. Unfortunately, this divides people and creates conflict and more danger and more problems. I fear that racism may be something bred into us in a way, even if it has more to do with differences and seeking to belong and be accepted than it does with race and somehow we have to overcome this or make progress towards it so that we can live a better way.
It didn’t take more than one or two lessons like this to drive home the meaning of race to my sister. Race was not something mutable, like a freckle or hairstyle; it defined who looked like whom, who was allowed in the group and who wasn’t. (42)
The main character’s sister learned race at a young age by two key experiences.
The first was with Barbies in preschool, gifts for the children distributed according to race. Since she was the only white girl, she had the only real Barbie and everyone else wanted it. While I could see how teachers may have been wanting to let kids have a doll they could relate to, it also created issues that they could not have the doll they wanted, they had no choice (just as we have no choice in our race). At the same time, one of the most upsetting parts may be the fact that the main Barbie is white. That said, with more white people in the population of the United States, it makes sense in a capitalist society that there would be more products directed towards white people. Nevertheless, this makes things unfair and perhaps there should not be a main one, but a group.
The second event related to her hair. Surrounded by African Americans for the most part and having a best friend who happened to be of that race, Alexandra wanted to have cornrows. With different hair though, she was made fun of and never tried again. This is difficult because we do have differences so there will be differences in styles and yet, we do not want to be exclusionary.
I was the only one who escaped the yardstick – and not, I knew even at the time, because I was particularly well behaved. Everyone involved, teacher and students, took it for granted that a black teacher would never cross the racial line to strike a white student. (46)
I found out that everyone else had been born in the year of the dog, 1970, while I – the ostensible first-grader among them – was born in the year of the rooster, 1969. The kids chuckled to themselves, but their laughter did not wound me the way the snaps of some of the black kids had. This, I would later realize, captured the essential difference between race and ethnicity. It would have seemed absurd if the black teacher had tried to integrate me into that class. Racial groupings were about dominion and struggles for power; what’s more, race barriers were taken as both natural and insurmountable./But in the Chinese class, eventually I began to feel I was part of the student community. (50)
By the time I left the Mini School I had learned what the concept of race meant. I now knew that, based on the color of my skin, I would be treated a certain way, where that entailed not getting rapped across the knuckles, not having a name like everyone else, or not having the same kind of hair as my best friend Some kids got unique treatment for being taller or heavier than everyone else, but being whiter than everyone else was a different matter altogether. Teachers usually did a good job of ignoring the fact that one kid was shorted than another or another was fatter, but it was they, not the other students, who made my skin color an issue The kids only picked up on the adult cues and then reinterpreted them. Moreover, height, weight, and other physical characteristics were relative states. But being white was constructed as a matter of kind, not degree. Either you were black, or you weren’t. Some of the kids in my original first-grade class were blancitos – lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans – but that didn’t mean that they got rapped on the knuckles any softer than the darker-skinned kids. Once you weren’t a blanco, it didn’t matter what your skin color was in P.S. 4. (53-54)
p. 43-45,_: separate classrooms by race
corporal punishment – not being whacked
being afraid of going to the bathroom
Chinese class – only student who did not receive a different name
This was a lesson not only about class but about the status of immigrants. Back in my neighborhood, it didn’t really seem to make much difference whether someone’s family had been in New York for a while or had just arrived from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic… we took Hispanic kids on their own terms, even absorbed some of their language and customs. Ozan, by contrast, seemed to carry the mark of foreignness with him through the halls of P.S. 41. It wasn’t about race, for he appeared as white as anyone else. It might have been about ethnicity, since his name certainly set him off from the rest of us. But the major division between Ozan and everyone else was of his own making: his political opinions, almost as a rule, diverged from those of the rest of the class. I found myself swayed by his intelligence and eloquent arguments on many occasions, but I resisted falling into his camp sine it would have meant ostracizing myself. (73)
music choices – white v. blacks
playing with fire – symmetry meant he threw a match which wasn’t burnt down – friend’s loft damaged – let off with no punishment
Class
Every few blocks the brown-bricked dwellings changed in name and only slightly in style… One structure might be a story or two taller than the adjacent one or have bricks a shade darker, but otherwise the buildings looked exactly alike, and they remained the same over the course of decades… There was never any new construction or renovation. And since the buildings were brick, there was never even a new coat of paint. The projects constituted a static monument to the social policy of their time. (13)
The housing complex had its own security force, was funded by its own government grant, and was managed by a nonprofit corporation instead of the city, all of which my mother found encouraging. Little did she know the security guards would do little to stop the violence in our buildings – cops getting shot in the elevator, hostages being taken in the pharmacy, girls getting raped in the stairwell. (14)
The flower box movement had embodied the notion that poverty was primarily an aesthetic problem. If we could just spruce things up a bit, we’d all have more hope; we might even become middle class. But by 19668 every surface in our neighborhood was covered by graffiti…perhaps because they were the most visible marker of urban blight, graffiti scrawlings, more than crime or drugs or family breakup, were what embarrassed me when I brought friends home from other areas of the city. It was four-color, in-your-face poverty. (20-21)
I was beginning to realize that eah student possessed a ense of elf-worth that translated into a certain position on the social ladder. Only much later did I realize that school dynamics and one’s sense of self-worth could not be isolated from family background. It was no oincidene, I would learn, that the most popular kids tended to be those wwhoe parents were the ricjest or mot powerful or held the most prestigious jobs. In my old school rhere had been no suh hierarchy of which I was aware – probably because no one’s parents were rich, powerful, or prestigious in any sense of the word. There, each kid invented his own place in the social network. The pecking order was, as best I could tell, determined primarily by brute force, by who could beat up whom. Other qualities mattered too, like athletic prowess, ability to snap, and overall sense of humor. (76)
needing to be smart to be accepted – a new culture of what is cool and acceptable
political importance – doughnuts for those who rooted for Carter
In society overall it may be that those who are in control have a larger voice, the ability to fil up the newspapers and airwaves with their opinions; but on the day-to-day level of the schoolyeard it was the less powerful who spoke more, clamoring to be heard by the reserved, better-off kids, who seemed to quietly pass judgement. (82)
This at of honesty appeared merely ritualistic to me, canned confession and punishment delivered with the aura that pervades the criminal justice system of oppressive dictatorship where the outcome is always prefigured. (87)
Rude sexual comments/jokes from other kids about his mom really bother me
assignments to go grocery shopping
food stamps v. real money
different foods
kinds of books/literacy available
absence of diversity
being embarrassed of his home because of the neighborhood it was in
street smarts that come from living in a bad area – didn’t lie, kid was nice when he acted innocent and oblivious
being barred from participating in the shopping other kids did
stealing – getting away with it
mugger money
getting paid – learning the incentive to work
Race and Class together
Race and class are nothing more than a set of stories we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality. (xii)
Fear
Crime and violence were not uncommon in our area, but they always seemed to happen elsewhere and, I believe, could be avoided, like the beer bottles falling from the sky. Even the castrations at school didn’t feel like a personal threat, I merely had to avoid the bathrooms to avoid danger. But the prospect of someone crashing through our twenty-first-floor window was frightening on another level. It meant I was not even safe in my own bed, not even behind our locked double-steel front door. In short, there was nothing I could do to escape risk. (59)
In retrospect, manhunt was not a strange game for us to be playing. Unlike baseball or football, it taught us important skills for life in the “ghetto.” It trained the hunted to evade both criminals and the police, who in that neighborhood were deemed equivalent. And it socialized the hunters to adopt a posse mentality, one that would become institutionalized among those who joined the local gang, The Junior Outlaws. (62)
Though I had moved up a rank in the karate hierarchy, my association with Rahim did not achieve the intended purpose of making me feel safer and more secure in the neighborhood, and for a simple reason: within a year Rahim was shot and killed. Evidently, even a black belt did little against a gun; in fact, it may have been a detriment. (64)
Somehow I had already developed a keen sense that crime and violence in our neighborhood were not random at all but followed certain patterns. The great dangerous they who committed crimes were neither unthinking nor uncalculating. (66)
It didn’t help that my father wouldn’t tell me definitely what had happened or that no one was ever prosecuted or even arrested or the crime. This lack of resolution gave me my first unsettling taste of powerlessness in the face of uncertainty… Before it, there were lies and there was truth, but I always knew which was which and figured others did as well. But in this case, no one would ever know what really happened; it was merely a matter of what eah individual chose to believe. There were two truth, and there were none. (66)
dressing up as policemen to rob and murder à don’t know who to trust
being broke into on the 21st floor – bars on windows – not feeling safe
Sean – on Sesame Street, was more empowered and popular – pulled a knife on him one day
Other
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. (5)
My mother’s misreading of signs was not limited to text. Frequently she got quite involved with men before they would confess to her that they were gay. (30)
His obliviousness was the opposite of my mother’s: whereas she was prone to see things that weren’t there, he was likely not to notice things that were. Both adaptions would serve them well in the inner city, where my mother maintained a vigilant and healthy dose of paranoia and where my father often had to step over unconscious junkies splayed out in the street or ignore bleating sirens as he walked my sister and me to and from school each day. (34-35)