Page 16 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Knowing ‘whiteness’ 9
Examining the white in the Union Jack

Much of the research on everyday experience of ‘race’ in Britain has fo-
4
cused on urban young people. In the case of considering white experience
as racialised, much of this too has focused on urban-based young people,
especially working-class men. This line of research has its roots in both cul-
tural studies and ethnography. There has been a gradual shift in this kind of
research from a focus on inter-racial friendships and cultural interchange to
examination of those who use explicitly racialised discourses and are often
self-identified racists. Focusing on language and semiotics, in particular the
usage of Creole among both black and white young people, Roger Hewitt
produced some of the first research in this area in his in-depth study of
friendship patterns in two areas of south London (Hewitt 1986). This study
focused specifically on the white end of inter-racial friendships because of
his interest in understanding racism and contexts where racism appeared to
be absent. This focus on inter-racial friendships and cultural exchange in the
form of language led to an emphasis more on synchronicity between youth
cultures and less on the perpetuation of racism. Les Back, cautioning against
‘projecting romantic and utopian desires on to the accounts and interpreta-
tions of the culture of young people’, set out to ‘examine how the formation
of identity, racism and multiculture is manifest within everyday life’ (Back
1996: 6). In his in-depth study of two different estates in south London, Back
explored the different racialised discourses of community utilised by black
and white young people as well as the formation of their social identities
and experience of racism. His research findings suggested that, where young
people grew up in more racially mixed areas, ‘profound and rigorously syn-
cretic cultural dialogues took place between black and white young people’
(Back 1996: 247). Back found that young whites, in adopting black idioms
of speech and vernacular culture, were marking their ‘vacation’ of concepts
of whiteness and blackness. However, this did not eliminate all expressions
of racism, particularly against those positioned as non-black racial others, in
this case Vietnamese youth.
A shift in focus in the research on white youth came with the realisa-
tion that, not only was racial harassment increasing rather than decreasing
through the 1980s and 1990s, but that it was as much, if not more, a feature
of white suburbs than racially mixed inner city areas (Hesse 1997; Nayak
1999). As Back writes:

what became clear by the early 1990s was that some of the most vio-
lent forms of racism were found in the outlying suburban districts. The
English suburbs were no less complex in their social composition but
what was striking was the degree to which quintessential middle-class
images of English gentility and the ‘good life’ converged with violence,
xenophobia and crude racism.
(Back 1998: 67)