Page 134 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 127
in various ways: it could be ‘good’ (or presumably bad); ‘strong’ (or presum-
ably weak); ‘more’ or less of a mix, or no mix at all. It could be too black,
too white or mixed enough. She emphasised that it was this ‘mix’ that she
was striving for rather than total white dominance: ‘I mean if I went into
an assembly and saw sort of 95 per cent white children, I’d be worried’.
However, a school that did not have ‘enough’ white children was defined as
being excluded from ‘good mainstream education’ (despite the fact that it
is meeting national standards in all subjects; Ofsted 1995). To some extent,
her use of the concept of mix seemed to draw on an (unlabelled) discourse
of multiculturalism where she wanted her son ‘to have a mixture of friends,
from lots of different backgrounds’. Thus, the right mix was a positive thing.
However, exactly why it was positive was not clearly elaborated. Deborah
did not explore what her son would be seen to gain from this ‘mixture’. But
it was clear that accompanying the desire for ‘mixture’, which was expressed
by others as ‘exposure’ to difference, was also a fear of what one might call
‘overexposure’ to non-whites. You could certainly have too much of a good
thing. The threat of a wrong ‘mix’ was enough for her to want to take her
son out of his school. Thus, Deborah’s discussion drew on, albeit perhaps
unconsciously, racist discourses of the threats to white people from being
outnumbered or swamped by racial others. Deborah’s anxiety surrounding
the concept of ‘mix’, while not directly concerned with the reproductive
mixing of ‘races’, did echo some of the anxieties about hybridity and mixing
that have periodically appeared in racial theories (see Young 1995). The
wrong ‘mix’ was not just a threat to the academic standards, but also to her
sense of security and stability and the social development of her child.
It is interesting that Deborah appeared to drastically overestimate the
proportion of pupils from ethnic minorities in the school. She was right
about white pupils being in the minority, but it was a much larger minority
than she estimated. The 1995 Ofsted report (Ofsted 1995: 3) found that
just under 60 per cent of the pupils came from ethnic minority groups, as
opposed to the possible 95 per cent that Deborah saw in school assembly.
In this case, blackness was not only visible, but had invisibilised the white
children, who made up 40 per cent of the school population. It would seem
6
that Deborah’s perception of ‘race’ was fuelled by fear. There may also have
been a conflation of ‘race’ and class in that her estimation of 95 per cent
would have been more accurate in terms of class. The Ofsted report states
that ‘most of the pupils come from local authority housing with a very small
percentage from owner occupier housing’ (Ofsted 1995: 3). It also adds that
unemployment in the catchment area of the school is well above the national
average and that the number of pupils eligible for free school meals (56 per
cent) is well above both national and London averages. Another possible
hint of a sense of being ‘swamped’ by racial others was the bewilderment De-
borah expresses about the dominance of black pupils in the school. ‘And it’s
quite a big school as well. I’m not sure how many children there are. I could
understand it more if it were a small school’. In the interview, I assumed that