Page 104 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 97
does feel like I’m in the minority’, you know. Almost like the tables had
been turned. But by the time you get down to Streatham it becomes
white again, it’s ever so odd, it’s like you sort of go through waves of
colours in London, concentrations of people.
(Interview 26)

Despite these big changes in her environment, London had now become
home for Helen. It was a place where she had roots and felt that she be-
longed. However, areas within London were clearly racialised and marked
for Helen, so she would not necessarily have felt so comfortable everywhere.
Helen went on to explain her understanding of the subtle gradations be-
tween different areas:

Helen: Yes, I’ve never felt, you know, like I stood out. I think, well,
because there’s every variety of person coming from every back-
ground here, I think . . . unless you ended up in the middle of a
sort of enclave, which you could say you ...I don’t know, say
you lived in [. . .] you know, in a massively sort of Hindu area
or something, you probably could feel quite strange, but gener-
ally speaking I think most people can be accepted in any big
city, without problems. [. . .] I expect that comes from people
wanting to feel comfortable where they live, so people gravitate
towards their ‘own’.
BB: And do you feel yourself doing ...I mean, how would you
characterise Camberwell within that kind of scheme?
Helen: Camberwell’s a mixture. I mean, I see Brixton as predominantly
black, and Peckham predominantly black, and Camberwell sort
of a little bit of a mixture, quite a nice mixture really, in the mid-
dle. Lots of black people, lots of white people, see some Indian
women around . . . and I find that . . . I’m not sure I would feel
comfortable living right in the middle of Brixton, to be honest
with you, any more than a black person would feel comfort-
able living in my village in the north-east. I’m sure they would
feel very uncomfortable. So . . . but I think people can live very
happily side-by-side, but just as the house share that I ended up
in Streatham, the people . . . we got on because we were all re-
ally from very similar backgrounds, wildly varying experiences,
but the backgrounds were virtually the same. And so people
do gravitate towards their own, don’t they, because familiarity
makes you feel comfortable.
(Helen, Interview 26)

Again, the visual becomes important. In Helen’s description of the area in
which she lived, with its mixture of colour, black and white and ‘a few Indian
women’, she seemed to be describing the mental image she had of a street