Growing Up White In The Lower East Side By Dalton Conley Summary

Dalton Conley’s memoir narrates how growing up white in the projects of NYC affected how he perceived race as he grew older. Growing up being one of the few white boys in a mostly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side made his childhood out of the ordinary. Conley opens up the book with an incident that underlines his experience with color in his childhood. In an attempt to show his unawareness to color, three year old, Conley whose mother was pregnant at that time, “kidnaps” a girl from a black separatist family that live next door because his mom 's pregnancy wasn 't progressing fast enough. The kidnapping situation offers the reader an interesting start into the issue of racial and cultural difficulties and a …show more content…
Although his parents chose to live in a federal housing project in Lower East Side, Manhattan, Conley comments that his grandparents were not poor and that their wealth gave a security blanket for him and his sister. He conveys some theories about how and why, in 1968, his parents didn’t buy a more comfortable loft in SoHo. In chapter three, Conley confesses to being guilty of the "ultimate sin in American society: downward mobility". His parents have each moved down the tracks of class and have ended up in the midst of poverty. In his parent’s case, we can note that there is an intergenerational social mobility as there is a downward social mobility in relation to their …show more content…
Conley’s mother was given the option of enrolling him in a predominantly Black, Puerto Rican, or Chinese class in his first classroom. His mother chose the classroom with predominantly black students. However, he was later moved to a Chinese classroom due to his clear discomfort being excluded out of disciplining by his teacher for being the only white student. In public school, Dalton begins to realize the difference between race and that "race was not mutable, like a freckle or a hairstyle; it defined who looked like whom, who was allowed to be in the group- and who wasn 't... we (him and his sister) had no idea that we belonged to the majority group, the privileged one…”
During his time in the Chinese classroom, the teacher tried to assimilate Conley into the culture, which he generally accepted as his own as much as he could. He applies this experience to differentiate between the view of race and ethnicity where he says, "It would have seemed absurd if the black teacher had tried to integrate me into that (black) class. Racial groupings were about domination and struggles for power; what 's more, race barriers were taken as both natural and