Page 154 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 147
Emma has had something approximating this novelised, fictionalised ex-
perience. She described 7 years of processes of subjection, producing classed,
gendered and racialised identifications that are wrapped up in a sense of
nation. Being patriotic, something that held special value for her, was also
associated with particular performances of gender: ‘you know, going to balls
and always being treated very nicely by boys’. However, Emma immediately
complicated this experience. Although it was ‘a special thing to be patriotic’,
in this specifically classed context, there was also the suggestion of disturbing
gendered power relations. In fact, the boys were not ‘treating you very nice-
ly’, but, whatever this unspecified bad treatment involved, Emma suggested
that she was compelled to accept it and keep silent as the boys continued to
hold open the door and pay for the taxi. The complex interplay of gender,
nation and class are encapsulated in this contradiction. Nevertheless, despite
the ambiguities, for Emma, there remained ‘something that I’d hate to lose
over that’.
The only other person in the fieldwork whose positive ‘patriotism’ could
match Emma’s did not actually speak to me, but was portrayed by his wife,
Beverley. Beverley was a working-class woman living in Clapham and she
described her husband Paul’s ‘patriotism’:

My husband, he’s a bit more patriotic [than me], I think. He is, you
know, he is English or British. He would never go abroad, as in America,
none of that interests him. He says, you know, there’s no point. Whereas
I would be a bit adventurous like that. But he’s still very, he’s very pa-
triotic, Paul is. But then again, it’s not drummed into them [their chil-
dren], they sort of do their own thing. His son’s 11 he doesn’t sit there
preaching saying ‘you shouldn’t go here, you shouldn’t go there because
you’re British’. He’s just – Paul is that way, you know? And because he’s
been brought up in south London, he thinks south London is the world
[laugh], you know! Full stop, type of thing. Yeah, he is very patriotic in
that way. Yes I would be a bit more adventurous. I don’t think ‘oh I’m
English, I shouldn’t’, I don’t sort of think like that. I think you should be
adventurous, you should dabble kind of thing, you know?
(Interview 42, emphasis Beverley’s)

It would seem that Beverley did not entirely approve of her husband’s ‘pa-
triotism’ – she pointed out that he did not drum his views into his children
and just had to be accepted as he was: ‘He’s just – Paul is that way’. But it
would also appear that this was a more working-class, explicitly exclusionary
nationalism or patriotism than Emma’s. Her associations of Englishness, as
we shall see below, would probably have little overlap with what Paul values,
based as his was in London: ‘South London is the world. Full stop’. Paul’s
‘patriotism’ was fuelled by insecurity, which makes him unwilling to take any
risks or be open to other experiences. Beverley, in contrast, was prepared to
be ‘adventurous’ and to ‘dabble’ with difference.