Page 101 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

94 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
with each other, I don’t know. But I think the children will be
much more accepting of different races, just the fact of being in
London, than I was. And I don’t think I was particularly bad.
(Jennifer, Interview 25)

This passage was a complex expression of an apparent desire as well as
regret, which is somewhat difficult to interpret. On the one hand, it was de-
sirable that visitors and friends were from racially different backgrounds ‘we
get quite a lot of mix in the house’. Another interviewee used very similar
language to describe positively the experience of having ‘different races that
come into the house’. Teresa spoke of always having ‘every nationality in
the house’ (Interview 18). The underlying assumption was that ‘difference’
was good and even something to be proud of. Nonetheless, the image was
uneasy, with an underlying sense of black intrusion into the otherwise white
space of the home or house. But then, on the other hand, the differences
should not be too extreme or that would constitute being ‘false’ with one’s
children, and the friends: ‘you know, you don’t want to go over the top at
showing them lots of different people’. I suspect that class was operating
here in making Jennifer’s friends not so different from herself. In addition,
those friendships that Jennifer did make seemed to operate on the avoidance
of conflict and utterances about difference ‘maybe when you’re with each
other, you don’t portray that side of things. You know, maybe you’re a bit
false with each other’. It is difficult to know what to make of this regret of
Jennifer’s. I suspect that her friends who came from different ethnic back-
grounds were ‘white’ through their class position. They acted and thought
as Jennifer did – or at least they appeared to: ‘maybe you’re a bit false with
each other, I don’t know’. This latter uncertainty hinted at some doubt in
the reality of ‘colour blindness’. Jennifer’s final comment about the impact
on her children of growing up in London suggested the racialisation of space
and location in the white imaginary, which is dealt with in the following
section.

Geographies of ‘race’ (small white girl comes to big bright lights)
Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith write that ‘race is a privileged metaphor
through which the confused text of the city is rendered comprehensible’
(Cross and Keith 1993: 9). It could also be said that geography and space
8
provide a map to living and understanding ‘race’. One common way of
talking about ‘race’ and cultural difference in the interviews was in terms of
geographical area. As Les Back writes: ‘Racism produces a particular kind
of urban imagination’ (Back 1998: 59). The previous section dealt with the
position of the black man in the white imaginary. This blackness is not free-
floating and always present but, as the last two examples suggest, located
within and prompted by particular contexts and juxtapositions. This sec-
tion will deal with the question of spatiality and location and its import for