Page 102 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 95
the white imaginary. The racialisation of the imagining of space is quite far
advanced in many areas of London, as Phil Cohen has explored (see Cohen
1993, 1996). Areas may be considered to be ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ in dif-
ferent ‘urban imaginings’ (Cohen 1996: 171). New settlement and/or ‘white
flight’ may also involve a shift in the identity of an area and those who live in
it (for an in-depth study of one area and notions of culture and community,
see Bauman 1996). Susan J. Smith emphasises the political processes behind
discursive shifts behind immigration being racialised and then conflated with
residential segregation. She argues that neo-conservative ideologies have
drawn territorial links between black residence and urban violence. This has
occurred in the context of the racialisation of culture: ‘whether because they
are potentially disruptive or simply “culturally” alien, the “black” inner cit-
ies have been successfully depicted as a threat to the fragile cohesion of the
nation’ (Smith 1993: 140). The racial imagining of space of course intersects
with the way in which areas are also ‘classed’. Tim Butler, for example, exam-
ines the ‘re-occupation’ of Hackney by white middle-class graduates (Cohen
1996). Just as geographical areas may be racialised, so individuals or groups
may be characterised by the areas in which they live. Pnina Werbner has spo-
ken about the way Asians in Britain are represented (by both academics and
the media) as spatialised communities with, for instance, Asians in Bradford
and the East End being represented as poor, fundamentalist and dangerous,
whereas those in Southall are appreciated in some mainstream discourses for
the flowering of Asian youth culture, and Leicester or Brent are seen as areas
for rich and successful East African Asians (Werbner 1999).
Many respondents clearly had a racialised imaginary of space and locality.
Most respondents had grown up in areas that they remembered as white.
9
However, they were often not entirely white. A common motif in the in-
terviews emerged as that of the ‘one black person in childhood’. Sometimes,
there were references to several classmates who were Asian or black. For
example, Sally described her rural village: ‘everyone in the village was white
anyway, I think without exception. I know occasionally there would be a
black child that came to my secondary school, for a short amount of time
and then they seemed to move on again’ (Interview 7). Similarly, Helen de-
scribed her school: ‘From the age of 11 onwards, I went to a private school
and there were, it was a girls’ school and there were Indian girls there. And
they were all doctors’ daughters’ (Interview 12). But for other interviewees,
a particular and isolated child was remembered, by name. Naming this child,
perhaps remembered by an exotic or unusual name, summoned them up
from the past:

When I was 15, we had a Chinese boy come to school, a Japanese, Kohji
Furuhata, I still remember his name! And that was the first time really
that I’d ever come across a child that was of a different race. [. . .] he
was a novelty, a total novelty. And, you know, it was almost to see if he
worked in the same way as me, it got to the point where you’d prod