Page 155 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

148 How English am I?
The world that Emma would hate to lose was clearly different from that
imagined by Paul. It was, nonetheless, far from the reality of Emma’s life
in an unfashionable and relatively deprived part of London. Her mother
disapproved of her choice of husband and told Emma that, as far as she was
concerned, they no longer shared the same class status:

My mother once said to me: ‘Oh Emma, you’re working class now’ and
I know that that’s something that she’d look down on, something she’d
prefer not to be. And in fact, I know that I’m not working class, I prob-
ably don’t have class. Or if anything I’m middle class.
(Interview 16)

So, for Emma, Englishness was framed by nostalgia and a sense of loss.
Loss because it never actually existed in the first place and because what
she had of it was tied to a particular class position and social life that she
no longer retained. This loss was expressed in her hostility to things Brit-
ish which represented the opposite of her rural middle-class English idyll,
which is constantly described as being under threat. If, following Paul Gilroy
(1992b), we read ‘culture’ as ‘race’, the threat is also to the whiteness of
England:

Emma: Living in London is much more about culture, about different
cultures. And it’s really, it’s very stimulating. I guess, I mean I
would like to live in New York and I would like that kind of
thing, but I’d never want to destroy England and its grassy plains
[laugh]. But where I suppose British means what we are now
with all our multicultural mix, with all our, Ireland and Scotland
and all of that kind of stuff. And I mean, there’s been so many
things that have happened to try and destroy England. All the
problems with the monarchy and all of that kind of stuff and it’s
all kind of sour, or it feels sour. I’d put that under the bracket of
British [big laugh].
BB: Which under the bracket of British?
Emma: All that nastiness [laugh].
BB: That’s your dumping ground!
Emma: The dumping ground.
(Interview 16)

The contrast here was clear. England is a rural place of ‘grassy plains’ with
order, hierarchy and tradition as represented by the monarchy. It was also
suggested to be a ‘pure’ ethnicity that is threatened with destruction by ‘all
our multicultural mix’, which was represented by Britishness. Britishness,
according to Emma, had disrupted the order of England and turned things
‘nasty’ and ‘sour’. Emma’s frequent laughter at what she was saying revealed
a certain nervousness about the subject, or recognition that her particular