Page 10 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Knowing ‘whiteness’ 3
know that they are white. White people’s conscious appreciation of their
‘whiteness’ may well be limited. They may only feel, or be conscious of
being, white in the presence of racialised others (and perhaps even then
only when they feel that they are in a minority). But I will argue that white-
ness is more than a conscious identity, it is also a position within racialised
discourses as well as a set of practices and imaginaries. As such, it plays a
part in constructing the identities that white people do express. It may un-
derpin notions of being a ‘woman’ or a ‘Londoner’ or ‘British’. Thus, I want
to show how white people are positioned within processes of racialisation,
even when they may not explicitly articulate their ‘whiteness’. This further
implies the need for a model of identity that goes beyond ‘identity politics’
and addresses processes of identification, as will be explored in Chapter 2. I
will suggest that ‘race’ needs to be understood as the product of a range of
discourses and practices, which construct how people see, understand and
live difference as racialised. ‘White’, ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ subjects are produced
through the operation of racialised discourses and practices. But these proc-
esses of racialised subject construction do not occur independently of gender
and class. Rather, ‘race’, class and gender intersect in complex and chang-
ing ways to produce different subjects and subjectivities. These intersections
which produce subjects are also located within specific contexts – time and
place matter. The ways in which whiteness works will be different in Britain
and South Africa. It will also be different in Hackney and Hampstead, or
New York and Nebraska.
Accordingly, this book sets out to examine not just white experience, but
particular gendered and classed articulations of white experience. The book
is based on material gathered from interviews with white women who were
living in south London (predominantly Clapham and Camberwell) and who
were bringing up young children. I set out to consider a series of questions
through the interviews: how do class, ‘race’ and gender construct the lived
experience of white women living in London?; how do they talk about and
imagine racialised differences?; how are their practices as mothers racialised,
classed and gendered?; do they encounter particular issues around ‘race’,
class and gender with their children?; how are they bringing up children who
are also raced, classed and gendered subjects?; do they live and move around
geographies in London and in England which they see as raced, classed or
gendered?; if they account for their lives, producing a narrative of their self,
how are these racialised, classed and gendered?; do they have a sense of a
collective, national identity?; do they feel English or British?; and how are
these identities raced, classed and gendered?
The interviews that resulted provide rich material for examining the in-
terplay of ‘race’, class and gender both in the constructions of the women’s
sense of self and in their everyday lives. By examining the interviews with
mothers living in specific areas of London, I am able to explore in depth
how subjectivities and experience are constructed by ‘raced’, classed and
gendered discourses and how they are produced in particular contexts. The