Page 145 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

7 How English am I? 1

Introduction

I see myself as British, um because, even though I was born here, soci-
ety has shown me, has led me to believe that I’m British. Not that I’m
English, that I’m British. The way that I look at it, just because of what
I’ve seen, just through working, going to school and working in, you
know, in England, you are British, you’re not English. English people are
white, that’s how we see English people, they’re white.
(Dawn, Interview 5, emphasis Dawn’s)

. . . if I said English, I think I’d feel very pedantic about it. I would be
saying, you know, I live in this country, but in this bit of the country.
[. . .] I mean, my mother-in-law gets so sort of, I mean, I can understand
her wanting to keep her identity, especially in a place like Scotland which
gets swamped by central power and the government and everything, or
has done in the past. I can see that one can become very sensitive about
it. But it does irritate me slightly because a part of me thinks, well, yes,
okay, I can see that you’ve got to have your identity like any kind of mi-
nority, this is really important, that you’re heard and you’re understood
and you’re not trampled over and taxed too much and all this kind of
thing. But you know, come on. Can’t we just all be British, and do we
even have to be that? You know, really. Isn’t it all just a waste of time
really?
(Deborah, Interview 17)

These two extracts from the interviews show different experiences of na-
tional identity. For Deborah, a white middle-class woman born in London,
national identity was an issue of minor importance and occasional irritation
caused particularly by the minority and secessionist claims of those in the
Celtic fringe. ‘Race’ was not an issue for Deborah, perhaps because there
was an underlying assumption that all concerned were white. However, for