Page 109 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

102 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
BB: Where would you put Camberwell on a map?
Joan: A black area. Definitely. There are a lot of African people mov-
ing in around this area as well.
[...]
BB: You definitely feel like, you feel like it’s a black area?
Joan: Oh definitely. Only I don’t feel like it, it is [laugh].
(Interview 8)

This raises the question of how many black people are required to make a
black area and how many white people a white area. One might assume that
at least 50 per cent of a given population would need to be black in order
for it to be designated as such. However, the identity of areas and the per-
ceptions of people do not work in such a way. There is no space here to do
an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the ways in which an area
was characterised by the interviewees and its actual population. However,
one indication of this relationship would be the fact that Brixton, which
was taken by all the interviewees who mentioned the area to be an accepted
‘black’ area, has at least over 50 per cent white people living in each of its
electoral wards (according to the 1991 population census). In a racialised
perceptual schema, numbers and dominance can easily be overestimated, as
the following extract illustrates. I had asked Liz, who was a school governor,
what the racial mix of the school was:

So I don’t know, quite a big mix I think. Actually, it’s so difficult, I was
just thinking, there was one photograph of Rachel’s in her first year in
fact. And when I looked at it I was quite surprised I think she was only
one of three Caucasian children in her class [taking the photograph out]
I think that’s, so I don’t know if that’s [looking at photo]. No there are
more, aren’t there. Girls I think I was looking at the girls or something,
so I don’t know if that’s any indication, I mean obviously it depends
from class to class. But that looks like it’s sort of half and half, doesn’t it?
You know, there’s a good mix, children of all . . . [laugh] sorts!
(Liz, Interview 43)

In her mind, the black children had been much more visible (to the point
of obliterating) than the white children. Here, we perhaps partly return to
the visual nature of racial differences. Black people may have a bigger visual
impact than their numbers justify. But they may also be perceived to have a
bigger social or cultural impact than is suggested by numbers alone.

Conclusion
I began this chapter with a discussion of the taboo nature of ‘race’ for those
who are positioned as white in Britain. This is not to say that the inter-
viewees were not prepared to talk about ‘race’ at all, but that ‘race’ was a