Page 110 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 103
topic that required delicacy and negotiation of difficult issues to talk about.
There were certain silences and absences, but also the presence of differ-
ent narratives and motifs. ‘Race’ was present in the interviewees’ lives in
terms of their interactions with others; it was not something that they were
conscious of intimately affecting their own sense of themselves. Thus, while
they took care to talk about and act on gender in various ways with the
children, ‘race’ was something that they avoided, lest they might make their
children view people and behave differently. To see difference was to risk
being racist. Therefore, the most ‘healthy’ or risk-free response was not to
notice anything. When children did remark on racialised physical differ-
ences, mothers largely sought to reassure themselves that this did not ‘mean
anything’. Some, however, also suggested that perhaps perceptual practices
were undergoing change and that what children saw, and in particular how
they responded to what they saw, may be different from their parents.
Other aspects of the interviews shed some light on the ways in which the
perceptual practices of the white interviewees were racialised. The examples
of the image of the threatening/exciting black man and the vividly remem-
bered ‘one black person in childhood’ both suggest ways in which there is a
constitutive outside to the norm of whiteness. This was both threatening and
desirable, reflecting the ambivalence entailed in occupying the position of
the norm. ‘Race’ was also imagined in conjunction with the urban, and thus
living in London was understood as a racialised experience. Living in Lon-
don was understood not only as offering a certain ‘exposure’ to difference,
but as productive of subjectivity. In particular, the metropolitan subject was
contrasted with those living in rural, or even suburban, areas. It should be
noted that this was particularly the case for those who lived in the more ‘ra-
cially mixed’ Camberwell than for those living in Clapham. Here, again, as
with accounts of childhood, whiteness was figured as an absence of ‘race’.
This chapter has opened up and explored some of the ways in which
‘race’ and blackness were understood and imagined by the interviewees.
In particular, it has examined the ways in which the concept of ‘race’ as a
perceptual schema can enable the analysis of qualitative material. This has
highlighted some of the difficulties facing research in this area. In analysing
interview material with individuals, one is involved both in tracing the dis-
courses they use, but also in attempting to surmise how they are influenced
by discourses that tell them what not to see and say. This is of necessity a
tentative process.
The chapter has also raised several themes that will be taken up in dif-
ferent ways in the rest of the thesis. The next chapter will explore further
interactional aspects of the interviewees’ lives in a way that also relates di-
rectly to the questions raised here of spatiality and location. A further way of
imagining location will be explored in the chapter on national identity.