Page 146 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 139
Dawn, a black woman born in England whose parents came from the Carib-
bean, national identity and ‘race’ were inextricable. To be English meant you
were white, at least in Dawn’s experience, and to be black in England meant
that how you defined yourself was at least partially dictated by others, by
‘society’. Both Deborah and Dawn used the collective ‘we’ but in different
senses. For Dawn, it was ‘we’ the black British who see English as a white
category. Deborah was asking why ‘we’ can’t all be British, but it was a call
to other white British people, such as her mother-in-law. These two accounts
clearly illustrate the ways in which the content of identity, such as national
identity, is determined by the position of the individuals engaged in con-
structing the identity. Dawn’s experience is certainly not unique. Her analysis
of her ability, as a black woman born in Britain, to claim an English identity
was shared by respondents in Ann Phoenix’s study: ‘It became clear in the
study that racialised identities intersected with national identities for many
young people, so that some black and some white young people saw English-
ness (and sometimes Britishness) as synonymous with whiteness’ (Phoenix
1995: 30). Ruby, a woman with a white English mother and Nigerian father,
interviewed by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, expressed similarly complex relations
with Englishness: ‘If you’re mixed race, if you’re not careful, you can fall
between two stools. Where you’re English, but you’re not quite, ’cos you’re
Black aren’t you. Or, you’re not really Black are you, because you’re English’
(Ifekwunigwe 1999: 85).
These experiences show the contested and racialised nature of national
identity and belonging to an imagined collectivity. For white people in
England, the contestations over national identity also have an impact, but
perhaps in a less direct way. Krishnan Kumar argues that the English can
no longer be complacent about their own positioning, and the loss of pro-
tection he identifies is likely to have particular relevance to white English:
‘In whichever direction they look, the English find themselves called upon
to reflect upon their identity and to re-think their position in the world.
The protective walls that shielded them from these questions are all coming
down’ (Kumar 2003: 16).
The interviews undertaken for this research took place at a time when
debates about nationhood and the meaning of Britishness and Englishness
were particularly alive. While the longer historical context was that of the
end of empire and changing relations with Europe, current debates about
the nature of Britishness and Englishness perhaps first emerged with the at-
tempts by the government of Margaret Thatcher to construct the syllabus for
a ‘national’ history in schools. This prompted an academic debate contest-
ing the notion of a ‘national’ history and discussing what it might contain
(see Samuel 1989; Schwarz 1996: 1). In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a
2
flood of books on the origins of Britain and/or England. In the immediate
3
context of the interviews, the new Blair Labour government had just come
into power in an election in which national identity had played a prominent
role. The conservatives were riven by debates about Europe. The ascendant