A review by outcolder
Honky by Dalton Conley

5.0

This book really messed me up, not least because the author is roughly my age and so I had this whole coulda been me thing going on in my head the whole time. I lived in the L.E.S. for most of the 90s, and saw first hand how people of color and the old school freaks were getting squeezed out, sometimes through violence but mostly just economics, and it was heart breaking, because I'd loved the neighborhood how it was and I knew I was part of the reason it was changing. This book adds another wrinkle, or rather more than just a wrinkle, to the injustice. While I was in schools in New Jersey, learning similar rules about race as what Dalton Conley learned on Avenue D, his friends were getting shot, stuck with mandatory sentences and other horrible shit. The comparison is clearest when Conley describes how he ended up on the pro-disco side at his integrated middle school. The clothes, the issue itself, even the confusion about what race "Another One Bites the Dust" Queen belonged to, all had their parallels in my middle school.
Another personal level for me was how strongly I identified with his parents, an artist and a writer -- The father especially, who genuinely prefers Avenue D to places like Westbeth.
It's not a total downer though, there is some humor, and the reader will learn a few choice old school LES snaps (your momma is so poor, she lives on Avenue E) and of course Dalton himself survives albeit with OCD.
If you've ever been white in the L.E.S., you should definitely read this, but I would really recommend it to anyone who is still troubled by their first grammar school lessons in american racism.