Kenny, Lorraine D. (2000). Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female. Reviewed by Kate K. Paxton, Arizona State University

	Kenny, Lorraine D. (2000). Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Pp. x + 229 $21.95     ISBN 0-813-52853-4 Reviewed by Kate K. Paxton Arizona State University October 13, 2004 Lorraine Kenny, the author of Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female, labels her text an autoethnography. Returning to her childhood home of Shoreham, a “typical” Long Island suburb, Kenny studies 8th grade girls at the local middle school in an attempt to get a window on the culture (or culturelessness) of the white middle class. In addition, Kenny includes analyses of three media stories of Long Island “white girls gone bad,” girls who in some way had broken the codes of what it means to be a “normal” member of the white middle class. Throughout the text, Kenny emphasizes her special dual role as a researcher, who, by standing apart from the community, can function as a critical lens, but also as an informant herself, having grown up in this same town, having been born and raised white, middle class, and female. Kenny’s informants are 8th grade girls in the Shoreham community, which is predominantly white and completely middle class. As females, however, “in a world that still largely places males and masculinity at its center,” they occupy a peripheral role in the culture of the middle class, Kenny argues (p. 2). As such, they are what Kenny terms “Insider-Others,” those who both are and are not part of this culture and its norms. As Insider-Others, these girls reveal through their actions (and the collective community’s response to these actions) what is and is not culturally acceptable. Seen at varying times as “good” or “bad” girls by their parents, peers, and community, these teenagers shed light on the rules and values of a culture that Kenny argues thrives in its silences, its avoidances, and its recognition of itself through emphatically reinforcing what it is not. True to ethnographic accounts, Kenny begins her text with an explanation of her methods, her biases, and her aims. However, Kenny makes it clear from the beginning that this book is a radical departure from a traditional ethnography. In fact, Kenny offers a mixed-methods study of race and identity construction through media and historical analysis, ethnographic inquiry, personal memoir, and cultural commentary. As an ethnography, or autoethnography, Kenny’s text ultimately does not measure up, however. Rather than striving to delve deeply into these girls’ lives and their stories, Kenny instead uses their narratives as fodder for her analysis of race, class, and gender constructs. However, as a groundbreaking text offering provocative insight into a culture that is regularly defined by its “lack of racial, class, and cultural consciousness,” and its unwillingness to study itself critically, Daughters of Suburbia contributes an important commentary on the “culture of privilege” and merits further discussion and examination of its themes (p. 6). Kenny’s most consistent argument in the book is that the notion of white middle class “culturelessness” functions as a self-interested strategy of maintaining and replicating the norms and values of this privileged culture. Suburbia, she argues, serves as an exclusive setting for the white middle class to surround itself with others who “are mirror images of themselves and their families, [where they never] have to encounter people of different racial and class standings” (p. 6). Kenny offers some evidence to support this claim, including an analysis of the genesis of suburbia post WWII as a haven of the white middle class from the influx of ethnic immigrants to urban areas, the local opposition in Shoreham to the proposed construction of a facility for “multiply handicapped retarded persons” in its village (p. 35), and the practice of “redlining,” in which the Federal Housing Authority rated neighborhoods as “green” or “red” based on their property values, and gave these ratings to banks to help determine which neighborhoods were good bets for giving loans (p. 62). As neighborhoods with high property values were invariably wealthier, predominantly white communities, this practice in essence perpetuated and furthered racial segregation and the exclusion of non-whites from suburban enclaves (Sacks, 1994, 94-97; Lipsitz, 1995). In her ethnographic research, Kenny’s account is thick on interpretation and consistently thin on data to support her conclusions. For example, in Chapter One, Kenny prints a letter she received from the principal at the local middle school at the onset of her study. The principal, Dr. Williams, one of the few nonwhite members of the school community, expressed concerns with several aspects of Kenny’s project proposal, most notably her desire to study the community of Shoreham as a prototypical white, middle class community. “What message are you giving to students and staff of color who live and work here?” he writes. “With a stroke of your pen, you have, it seems, eliminated the non-white segments of our community” (p. 29). Kenny was startled by this letter and repeatedly uses it as evidence of the pervasiveness of the culture of avoidance in this community: “I would not soon forget the underlying tenor of Dr. Williams’ letter: race, especially whiteness, is not an ‘appropriate’ topic of discussion at [this school]” (p. 32). However, nothing in Williams’s letter suggests that he is not interested in fostering discussion of these and other race, class, and gender-based issues; he simply registers unease in the approach that Kenny is taking. “[My] concern,” he emphasizes, is “not with [Kenny’s] research in general, but rather with how it could be carried out in a public school setting if [Kenny] were only planning to be involved with the white students” (p. 31). In fact, Williams’s letter is solid evidence that disputes Kenny’s notion of Shoreham as a representative culture of avoidance: in writing the letter, the principal openly and forcefully confronts and reflects on problems of race and class in Shoreham, and acknowledges concern for how the non-white members of the school community will be affected or excluded by the study. In another instance, Kenny writes of a teacher at the school who disliked a student and his mother because they had raised concerns about her teaching practice while he was in her class. Kenny then writes, “I suspected that her disdain for David and his mother went beyond this earlier incident. After all, they did live in the wealthiest, old-money section of Shoreham, while [the teacher] merely lived in one of the posher new-money places” (p. 113). Kenny’s interpretation of the teacher’s dislike for this student and his mother all but glossed over the teacher’s account of her personal motivations in favor of a class-based prejudice that received no substantiation in the text. In a purportedly ethnographic account, repeated examples of unsupported conclusions are inexcusable, and jeopardize Kenny’s status as a trustworthy ethnographer. Kenny fleshes out her racial and cultural analysis and ethnographies of the Shoreham girls with media portraits of well-known Long Island girls Amy Fisher (who shot her “lover’s” wife, Mary Jo Buttafuoco), Cheryl Pierson, an “All-American” girl who hired a classmate to murder who father, whom she claimed had sexually abused her; and Emily Heinrichs, a white, middle class girl from Pennsylvania who joined and then left a white supremacist group as a teen. Kenny argues that these stories help define the norms of white suburbia through highlighting what the culture of the middle class considers outside its acceptable boundaries of conduct. However, because these transgressions are virtually universally condemned across cultures, this argument lacks force. Kenny’s most insightful contribution here is her portrait of Emily, the teenage white supremacist-turned mom who, through her story, demonstrates her struggles with racial identity and cultural ambiguity. Of the three media stories, Kenny most succeeds in this account in demonstrating how Emily’s struggle mirrors the efforts that “more normal” white, middle class girls undertake to understand themselves and their identities in the contexts of their suburban communities. Emily’s embrace of the white supremacists and subsequent efforts to make sense of her own cultural identity after her self-imposed exile from that group highlights the degree to which mainstream white America fails to give its children a constructive, critical, and dialectical view of themselves and their culture in relation to others (p. 162). Although Daughters of Suburbia is primarily a critique of the white middle class and its so-called culture of avoidance, Kenny ends her account with an offer of hope and critical optimism: “the question that remains hanging for these students and for Emily is how to have a white identity that neither denies nor overvalues itself” (p. 163). Unfortunately, the text ends shortly thereafter. Kenny suggests that the dilemma of Emily’s story is that it “doesn’t offer many solutions to the predicament of white culture or what is experienced as white culturelessness” (p. 164). Kenny falls prey to her own critique, for the most part, but does offer a possible solution: “a fuller presentation of race to all kids, one that includes articulations and understandings of whiteness as a racial category that can speak its history and culture—for better and worse—without reverting to white supremacy, would begin to foreground the intentionally mute foundations of the current racial order” (p. 165). This proposed self-reflexive addition to multicultural curricula is intriguing indeed. Kenny might have better served her audience had she focused on this critical race analysis and its impact on identity formation, and elaborated on potential solutions. In all, Kenny’s sparse ethnographic accounts leave the reader wanting more and fail to substantiate her cultural and racial critique of white, middle class, suburban America. Yet, through her analysis, she intelligently captures the lack of consciousness and critical dialogue that haunts this culture of privilege. In this sense, Daughters of Suburbia stands as an important contribution to social justice and cross-cultural communication, and equity and reform along race, class, and gender-based lines. References Lipsitz, George. 1995. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies.” American Quarterly 47(3), 369-387. Sacks, Karen Brodkin. 1994. “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” In Race. Eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.