Page 15 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

8 Knowing ‘whiteness’
While one is tempted to add ‘naively’ to their interrogatory list, I think
it would be more correct to see their plea as misplaced. Rather than seeing
whiteness as involving the study of ‘one group at a time’, I would argue
that it can only be analysed within a framework of racialisation. If a field of
‘white studies’ exists at all, it is at most a subset of other concerns around
‘race’ and identity. It would be preferable to avoid the idea of a distinct
field or area of study altogether. The project of studying whiteness should
be seen as an integral part of understanding the ‘stratified construction of
race/colors’. This involves a relational rather than the self-contained analysis
that is suggested.
There is a risk that, in the field of ‘white studies’, which is dominated
by concerns arising from the situation in the US, the importance of con-
textualising any discussions around ‘race’ and identity will be overlooked.
Frankenberg stresses how the collection that she has put together ‘break[s]
new ground’ because the texts ‘emphasise and document how whiteness is
always emplaced, temporally and spacially’ (Frankenberg 1997: 21). Ruth
Frankenberg’s own ground-breaking study, White Women, Race Matters:
The Social Construction of Whiteness, provides one potential model for this
research. It is an exception to the tendency in Britain (discussed below) to
study working-class youth. Frankenberg interviewed women from varied
class backgrounds and of a wide age range living in California. She adopted
a broadly life history approach with the women, many of whom had been
active in anti-racist or feminist activism. Her research established the impor-
tance of examining the accounts of white women to explore the construc-
tion of whiteness. However, there are several important methodological and
theoretical differences in my approach. A key one is that my research takes
different women living in specific geographical areas, but also at a particular
common moment in their lives – that of being mothers of young children.
Thus, the study focuses on those issues, such as schooling and parental so-
cialising, that were particularly significant to the women at this specific mo-
ment in their lives. It also enables a thoroughgoing examination of the ways
in which talk about questions such as to which school to send your child
and, more broadly, socialising children can be highly raced as well as classed
and gendered. In addition, in this research, as will be explored in Chapter 4,
I also examine the ways in which production of the self is narrativised and
raced. As Frankenberg herself argues, context is extremely important. What
‘whiteness’ means and how it is experienced will vary considerably, not
only over time and between Britain and the US, but also between London
and Cornwall. The debates that arise in these different situations cannot be
transported between them without adaptation. Therefore, in the following
discussion, I focus on a range of research undertaken in Britain, which con-
stitutes one important context of this book.