Page 111 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

6 In search of a ‘good mix’

‘Race’, class and gender and
practices of mothering

Introduction

I remember sitting outside a winebar in the summer down in Chancery
Road which is just up the High Street, a couple of roads away, just at the
time when people were collecting their children from school, and you
see mothers in enormous cars with children in school uniform, who are
obviously going to private schools. And you see women pushing buggies
with children and having collected other people’s children going to the
estates just round the corner. Um, there is . . ., considering in such a
small area, there are so many different kinds of backgrounds, it never
ceases to amaze me how little people socialise.
(Deborah, Interview 17)
Deborah provided an evocative account of a particular street scene. There
she was, sitting outside a winebar, which in itself suggests a certain classed
nature of the area and of herself as a subject. And as she watched people go
by, she was able to see just by looking at them how they too were classed.
Class is embodied and marked. She ‘knows’ by their ‘enormous cars’, or
their wearing of uniforms from private schools, or the ways in which they
are dressed, the buggies they push and the collection of children with them,
which told her that they are bound for ‘the estate’. ‘Race’ was silent in this
account, but no doubt she would also have remarked racialised differences as
she sat watching the world go by. What struck Deborah most in recollecting
or reconstructing this scene was not so much the existence of these differ-
ences, or her own ability to read these differences, but ‘how little people
socialise’. In the interview, Deborah went on to suggest possible reasons why
people fail to socialise across these differences. She blamed the lack of ‘facili-
ties’, including the way schools were unable to create a sense of ‘cohesion,
make the community stay as a sort of community’. She discussed the rise
in house prices in the area and the effect this had on patterns of residence.
Deborah conjured up the fantasy of a time in the past when things were
better, although there was also some uncertainty that this ever existed ‘I just