So in reading the first section, I found it really interesting how he brought age into the race discussion. At such a young age, he was able to see the color, but not the "difference." In reality, I think more people should look at others like this. He was living in the projects with little money and going to the same schools. Other than his skin, he was the same.
It is the adults in the story who make a big deal over the difference of color. The teacher not hitting him, but hitting all of the black kids... If she was going to hit to discipline, hit everyone. Even though he got the "better end of the deal," he was still being discriminated against. He saw this as being separate from the group. Kids always just want to be part of the group, so this is more detrimental than helpful.
In my other class on nutrition, it is discussed how kids eat when they are hungry as their body tells them. This is nature. It is not until the kids are about four years old that they begin to take on the ideas of adults, like eating when bored or for a craving rather than to fuel the body simply for energy. Conley seems to make a similar point. It is not until the parents and teachers show the kids how to act about their own race and others, do they see the difference. In reading this so far, I feel that the adults could learn a thing or two from the kids. It should be more about where you come from and the person you are than the color of your skin or the type of hair you have.
I agree with Kristen, in that people are always complaining about discrimination and how there needs to be a change and etc. However it's usually those first to criticize who are last to implement what they preach in their own lives.
One thing I really thought interesting was the whole scenario of when Conley wouldn't use the bathroom at school. Specifically, when his mother was asked if she wanted him to be treated (meaning punished) like all the other kids, she said no. Instead she made the lame attempt to ask if the other kids wouldn't be punished. Now, from what we were told by Conley, both of his parents were rather intelligent people, so I find it hard to believe that his mother really thought the school would stop punishing the other kids just so Dalton could feel more comfortable. Instead of continuing his special treatment, she should have let the school punish him along with all the other schoolchildren. But then again, it just goes to show the sort of bias that still exists even when a "white" family is the minority of a community.
One last point brought up I'd like to bring up, is described by Conley on page 37:
She and I attended nursery school courtesy of the federally subsidized Head Start program... Head Start was the result of a decade of research showing that the educational deficits poor kids faced in high school could be traced back to their preschool years- that is, to the time when they were with their parents at home. never mind what this implied about certain people's parenting practices; the answer was to provide poor kids with day care where they would get at least one nutritious meal a day and be exposed to educational toys.
Here he brings up a good point that I don't think has to do so much with race or class as it does the family as a whole: People are so quick to rely on the government to better their lives, instead of taking some of that responsibility as their own. As I said before, if you want a change you have to implement it in your own life, and not just rely on some government program to do it for you- a reliance which unfortunately is very characteristic of the lower classes.
So in reading the first section, I found it really interesting how he brought age into the race discussion. At such a young age, he was able to see the color, but not the "difference." In reality, I think more people should look at others like this. He was living in the projects with little money and going to the same schools. Other than his skin, he was the same.
On the one hand, there's this great idyllic quality to Honky where, as Kristen points out, children are exempt from everyone else's ideas about race and can get along with each other. But it doesn't always work out -- like on pp 40-42 where Alexandra wants cornrows. She wants them to be the same as everybody else and "fit in with the rest of the kids in the playground" (40), but when she gets them, the other girls make fun of her for having them. She can't win either way. There are certain moments where the children are conscious of difference and it's interesting to ask why those moments, what triggers them.
Come to think of it, it seems to me that Dalton fares a little better overall than his sister (who also has the episode where she's the only one in the class who gets a "real" Barbie). Maybe there are also gender issues bound up in this?
Dalton makes an interesting point about foreignness when he talks about Ozen: “ 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 difference between Ozan and everyone else was of his own making: his political opinions, almost as a rule, diverged from those of the rest of class.” The way in which Dalton fits into P.S. 41 is by acquiring everyone else’s ideas and knowledge. Whiteness does not really come much into the picture here as it did back in his old school. It seems strange to me that Ozen would be more excluded than Dalton in a school where class would be the key issue. What he implies here is that class and race here don’t matter so much as having the same ideas does. Ideas separate people in P.S. 41 whereas race separates people in Dalton’s old school.
It is interesting how kids fit themselves into the profile for each scenario. They are very vulnerable in their ideas about race, class, ethnicity, etc…. and they clearly don’t see these things from a clear perspective. By the time Dalton starts going to P.S. 41 he has some idea about race and how he was discriminated against for being white. I wonder if he would have felt integrated all the time had he never attended his old school. Is class as easy to hide as ideas?
I really think it is interesting to look at his experiences at P.S. 4 versus P.S. 41. Like Valentina said, he went from being the sort of "outcast" racially speaking, to blending in with the crowd (again, not culturally but racially). One thing that Dalton pointed out, that I really liked about his experience at P.S. 41 was the fact that Ozan was so intellectual and outspoken about it, despite any cultural differences between him and his classmates. I think it's very rare when people encounter situations where the "outsider" has enough gumption to speak out against the norm- especially in elementary school and through politics.
Children are conscious of their differences when they don’t get to do the same things that their friends do. Alexandra sees a possibility of being like her friends and makes an effort to do so when she gets cornrows. She obviously realizes she is different when people make fun of her because it just doesn’t ‘look’ the same. If lets say some girls are dressing up as princesses and one of them doesn’t fit in one of the dresses she is going to feel different and the other girls might make fun of her because kids are cruel. They might not know the meaning of making fun of Alexandra’s cornrows, but they do realize she doesn’t look the same. On the other hand I definitely think that there is a gender issue bound up in this because girls tend to notice these physical traits more than boys. Boys are just about playing games that don’t involve looks. So I definitely think that girls are more conscious about what their differences are physically than boys.
I would have to agree with Valentina in the sense of there being a gender issue. I also feel that girls notice things more. I feel that we sometimes have a tendency to overanalyze certain situations which leads to a greater problem than the problem at hand; boys on the other hand just shrug off the same situations that girls spend days deviating over.
I think that society also places more emphasis on the way that girls look than it does on the way that boys look. I feel that if Alexandra had been a boy with cornrows it might have gone unnoticed or if not unnoticed not really something worth much discussion. I feel that boys are allowed more room when it comes to dressing in a “different” style; a style that is not directly associated with their ethnic group.
I really am finding the idea of "white minority" fascinating. Just the words themselves denote some sort of negative attachment especially the word minority. Another facinating moment was that of the conrows and how his sister ranted about how stupid conrows were and about "taking comfort in the cultural value of her whiteness" (42) How is her hairstyle a cultural value? The use of the word "they" is also fascinating. "The they who made up these policies were, on the surface, quite different in character from the they who stole car radios or cut off the peckers of my classmates at the Mini School." Is the they usuage referring to race, class, gender or just an other? Another interesting fact is the point of view from which he writes seemingly like an observer when its his own life. Its almost like a sociological nostalgia.
I also found it interesting that at a young age Dalton was able to see color but not any difference. It shows how corrupt society is in a way, basing and building everything based on race and class.
Tiffany said she found it hard to believe the mother though the school would actually stop punishing kids in order to make Dalton feel more comfortable. If I were Dalton’s mother, I of course wouldn’t want my son getting hit and would agree that no one else’s child should be hit. I guess Dalton’s mom didn’t really believe the school would do anything but I think she made an attempt to at least try to persuade them not to by pointing out why is my son not being hit while others are. The mother anyway, seemed like a person oblivious to class and race, “these concepts didn’t register with her.” (pg 30)
So, I guess she really believed the school would stop hitting children, she never really thought about the problems at all. Is that white privilege?
To respond to Sarah: not having outlandish and particularly "black" hairstyles is a very distinct white, or at least WASP, cultural value. "Good, honest, white folks don't have those silly black people's hairstyles" is not perhaps an often expressed but certainly understood rule of a good white family. After attempting to deny this by having a "black" hairstyle his sister is rejected by the people this is supposed to bring her closer to, and returns to her "white" hairstyle, with which she is accepted, and so her hair becomes a sort of symbol for her overall whiteness, her white cultural values, as the most comfortable to her.
One interesting thing for me in this section of the reading was the return to issues of speech and silence, which are maybe even more pervasive than I thought. While these issues seem to be of obvious importance in stories about immigration and learning a new language, I had forgotten that they turn up even in an autobiography of whiteness: "That day I learned the power of silence -- that if used appropriately it was more potent than most things that could be said in its place. It was also one of the tools used by the popular kids at P.S. 41 and was itself not unrelated to class. In society overall it may be that those who are in control have a larger voice, the ability to fill up the newspapers and airwaves with their opinions, but on the day-to-day level of the schoolyard it was the less powerful who spoke more, clamoring to be heard by the reserved, better-off kids, who seemed to quietly pass judgment" (77-78). This seems to be the opposite of what we've seen before -- how much power, or what kind of power, do figures like Rodriguez's father and the quiet Chinese American girl the narrator assaults in The Woman Warrior have? On one hand, it seems to be limited -- on the other, who actually wins the fight between Maxine and the quiet girl? Or perhaps the entire issue is class, and if you're upper class, you can either speak or be silent as you choose, while remaining in charge, and if you're not, then neither speech nor silence makes a difference.
Another thing that strikes me as a potentially interesting project is to pull out what's in Conley's "invisible knapsack" -- he, like McIntosh, identifies whiteness as a privilege, so which specific privileges does he see, and are they the same ones as hers or do they add to or otherwise alter the list? For example, there's the end of chapter 9, in which a key privilege is "the right to make up the reasons things turn out the way they do, to construct our own narratives rather than having the media and society do it for us" (110). Do any others jump out at you?
Another white privilege that I have seen in Honky is the privilege to pass as we have talked about in ‘My Grandmother’s Passing.’ Dalton had the opportunity to pass as one of the other white middle class kids in PS 42 unlike other members of his community who couldn’t have done it given the same situation. He even talks about the foreign kid in his class who is middle class but cant pass as another white kid for his name, his race or his views. Dalton definitely does this and to some point I think he definitely passes despite his background. First he starts by giving the meaning of ‘antidisestablishmentarism’ and passing as ‘intelligent,’ a crucial characteristic in his new school. Along the same lines he become obsessed with learning what his classmates knew so he studies every encyclopedia. Then he decides to support the political views of the kids in PS 41 to ultimately ‘become’ one of them the day that all kids agree to support Ford for the free donuts.
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