Page 159 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

152 How English am I?
Englishness’. This suggests that Englishness was being understood more as
an ethnicity than as a nationality:

You can claim any nationality you want as long as you believe that is
your nationality. I think you could, you could move to any country in
the world, and if you said this is where I want to stay, you can ...I
think nationality is an attitude of mind, I don’t think it’s anything more
practical than that. It gets bogged down in practicalities because of im-
migration and because of the way government treats people, but I actu-
ally think a sense of nationality is to do with society, and you could live
in a country for 40 years and never feel really part of it. You know, you
get ex-pats who’ve been living abroad for years and years and years, but
still absolutely see themselves as British. Or never see themselves as part
of that culture. And then you get other people who move out and within
6 months have absolutely adopted it, and said, ‘yes, this is it, this is the
place for me. And I feel part of it’. So, I think fundamentally it’s much
more to do with an attitude of mind. So, you know, I don’t know, I have
no idea and I wouldn’t wish to say to any racial group or individual
that they should or shouldn’t feel British. It’s up to them. You know, if
they’re here and they’re working, they’re paying taxes, they have every
right to be here. They’re putting money into the system like everybody
else is, and if they’re here for 2 years or 20 years, you know, that’s their
own individual choice really.
(Interview 15)

In the section above, Heather promoted a truly voluntaristic notion of
national identity. Here, she is not concerned with the cultural identity she
brought into her discussions of national history and cultural products. Never-
theless, in the above account, nationality was more than the mere holding
of a passport, it involved an intangible ‘attitude of mind’. She wanted to
avoid ‘getting bogged down in practicalities’ of immigration – for Heather,
nationality was more than a legal status. Nonetheless, while she wished to be
open in allowing ‘any racial group or individual’ to ‘feel British’, she also set
the criteria that they should ‘pay taxes’ and contribute. This was a complex
and perhaps contradictory view of nationality – mixing as it does elements
of ethnicity. It is unlikely that Heather would require white people born of
British subjects to work and pay taxes before they could consider themselves
British. The nature of this belonging was not very clear. What do you have
to feel to feel British? When I went on to ask Heather whether the fact
that many British people were not white had changed the meaning of the
category itself, she appeared to continue to imply that white people remain
the gatekeepers of British identity: ‘we’ are open-minded about ‘them’:

BB: But do you think ...I mean, I suppose the notion of what is
British, do you think it has changed in response to the fact that
there are a lot of non-white British people?