Page 133 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

126 In search of a ‘good mix’
at nursery level and where he was very happy. It does not appear to be a
problem for her son, who she said was so keen to start ‘big’ school that he
had been known to take himself off and try and tag onto a class queuing
up and about to enter the school. Deborah’s hesitancy about the school did
not rest on unsatisfactory standards or equipment or even the behaviour of
teachers or pupils.

I mean, I haven’t actually got that many worries about the, really, the
teaching or the standards there . . . so much. It’s not a great standard,
but I don’t know how much that matters when children are younger,
and when you teach them at home . . . and it’s no worse than a lot of
schools that have got more of a mix of kids in them.
(Interview 17).

Nor was it solely the lack of other middle-class pupils. It was also that it
had ‘too few’ white faces. Thus, her account of how the people in her area
did not send their children to the local state school became at least as much
about white flight as middle-class flight:

It’s very difficult to separate class and race a lot of the time, but I suppose
they do go hand-in-hand just through necessity, and that’s the way things
work out [. . .] And that’s what really worries me about this school, and I
think it’s sad because what happens is that I think a lot of people see this,
and they don’t send their children there after . . . reception, or nursery,
and the children get moved and the mix never ever gets any stronger.
The mix doesn’t become more like a mix, as it were. You know. And it’s
really sad.
(Interview 17)

The way in which white middle classness functioned as a norm is clear
in this account. Deborah had a clear idea of a very specific group of white
middle-class people who constitute her norm: ‘But you know that’s why I
wouldn’t want him to go to a private school. One of the reasons. In fact, I
can’t afford it, but you know, I would be very worried about him just mixing
with people from his own background, or similar background to his’. There
is a powerful sense that the white middle class constitutes an everyday or
common sense norm – a group with predictable and reasonable responses
to situations. This norm was measured against those who did not make such
choices – who could not move into the street because it was too expensive
or who did not react against a school having less than 50 per cent white
pupils.
Deborah was careful to try to avoid the appearance of racism in what
she was saying about the school. She had developed a concept of the ap-
propriate racial ‘mix’ that properly reflected the ‘community’. Both these
notions of mix and community merit some examination. Deborah used mix