Page 157 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

150 How English am I?
Emma’s version of Englishness and Britishness was stereotyped and lived
mostly in her imagination. Englishness was somehow truly what England
should be – refined, rural, white and middle class (albeit with problematic
gender relations), whereas Britishness was a category that could absorb all
that disrupted this notion and disturbed Emma herself. This made it all the
more clear for her that the multiracial scenes she witnessed on the streets
in which she lived were ‘alien’ and certainly not ‘English’. This contrast,
between Englishness and Britishness, was finally represented by the juxta-
position of the local halal butcher and ‘a little village shop in the country’.
The latter was ‘quaint’ in contrast to the unsettling market shops, which
‘smell funny’. The threat that Emma perceived was profound and was ex-
pressed here as a threat to the domestic. How could she reproduce English-
ness if she had to negotiate these alien shops and foodstuffs?
Emma quoted (somewhat disapprovingly) her mother as remarking after
walking around the area in which she lived ‘Oh it was just like being in
Nairobi or Lagos’. Africa here symbolised the ultimate, racialised other. But
Emma’s mother was achieving an interesting doubling in this statement. On
the one hand, she was accusing her daughter of not only being ‘working
class’ (as we saw above) but, on the other, she was positioning herself as the
agent of the colonial gaze.
For Emma, Englishness and Britishness seemed to be mutually incompat-
ible. Emma reflected on her daughter’s identity ‘if she has that [Britishness]
and doesn’t have Englishness, well then one of the two. Perhaps you can’t
perhaps – I had both and therefore fall between two stools’. It is ironic that
Emma used the same metaphor of ‘falling between two stools’ that Ruby (a
woman interviewed by Jayne Ifekwunigwe quoted in the introduction to this
section) used to describe the mutually exclusive identities of Englishness and
blackness. While she did not say so explicitly, it would seem clear that, for
Emma too, Englishness and blackness were mutually incompatible. Further-
more, Englishness (and forms of class and gender relations that are imagined
as part of this idea of nation) could not survive in the face of ‘multicultural’
Britain. Emma’s anxieties about national identity appeared to be a means to
express anxiety about her own sense of self. The narratives of her self and of
Englishness were interwoven.

Heather

Heather did not share with Emma such a clear distinction between British
and English. Her rendition of the two identities was perhaps more complex
and sophisticated. She would put British on a form asking her nationality,
but this did not express exactly how she felt. It remained an empty category,
which she used because that was what felt more acceptable:

[I would put ‘British’ on a form] probably because I am trying to be
politically correct. I would say I am absolutely English. You know, I am
not Scottish or Irish. They are very different. Very different. There is no