Why do I sympathize with Benji?

We've been in Sag Harbor for a while now, but I haven't posted about it yet because I wasn't sure how I felt about it. It started out kind of slow and I was having a hard time figuring out Ben the narrator. But, by the end of "To Prevent Flare-Ups" I am really into the book and find myself thoroughly sympathizing with Benji.

Which brings me to an interesting question: why do I sympathize with Benji? The other novels this course where I have really sympathized with the narrator have been The Catcher in the Rye and Black Swan Green. These both make sense for me to sympathize with, because Holden Caulfield and Jason Taylor represent me pretty well. Holden gets mad at all the fakeness of teenagers and adults, something I myself do quite often. His struggles to cope with this echo my own, albeit on a more dramatic scale. Jason Taylor does a magnificent job of representing early-teen culture in the form of a middle class white kid. I remember lots about that time in my own life and what was hard about that stage (if truth be told, a lot of the stuff Jason encounters is stuff that happens through high school as much as elementary).

Some of the other protagonists we have followed I have not had that much in common with, and consequently have not sympathized as much with. While I appreciate going on intellectual adventures with Stephen Ruth or watching the breakdown of Esther and find these things interesting, they seem much more detached from me and I wasn't on the edge of my seat rooting for them as I was for Holden and Jason. I suppose this is because they are different from me. Stephen is unlike anyone else. Period. Ruth and Esther are both girls and are dealing with situations that I never experienced, so it's not surprising that I have trouble caring as much about them.

But here is where it gets interesting: I sympathize strongly with Benji even though I have almost nothing in common with him, other than being middle class. Benji is black, and as such has to deal with identity problems I never had to deal with. I have never had to worry whether I was "white" enough or anything like that. Based on what we read in the last chapter, his home life is very unstable and violent, something I am happy to say I have never had to deal with. And on the supposed other end of the spectrum, I was never as nerdy as Benji seems to be, never having gotten into things like comic books or D&D. But nevertheless, I am fanatically rooting for Benji throughout the entire book.

I suppose it might be because he is a boy close to my own age, and the way a boy that age thinks and interacts is so familiar to me that it is able to transcend our differences. Or maybe his experience as a middle class black kid in NYC is not that different than mine as a middle-class white kid in the midwest, despite all the apparent differences. I don't know. Some of the things, like the boys sitting around trashing each other and him describing his summer job, seem familiar to me, but other things like worrying about a head-pat, are entirely foreign to me. Maybe I'll figure out by the end of the book just why I'm drawn to Benji as a character so much.