Page 160 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 153
Heather: Yes. Definitely, definitely. I think we are much more open-mind-
ed. I think if you asked the average person 50 years ago, could
someone who was black be British, most people would have said
no. They’re obviously from somewhere different, they’re not
really British. Whereas now, most people would say, yes, if they
were ...I think a lot of people draw the line if they’re born in
this country, that’s what makes you British, if you’re born here.
I personally . . . that’s not the line I would draw. But I think
people are a lot more open-minded, there’s still a long way to
go, but I think people accept that, you know, if you’ve lived here
for some period of time, then you adopt this country and that
makes you British.
(Interview 15)

However, in another part of the interview, Heather shows that she was
sensitive to claims for cultural difference to be respected and that British
culture was characterised by its whiteness which excluded some others.

You know, there are on the surface – you can say: ‘yes, everything’s fine’
and ‘yes, it’s great. It is not an issue for me’, but, to say it is not an issue
for me is not fair because it is an issue for a lot of different racial groups
because of the way other members of society treat them. So it is not re-
ally fair to say if everyone was like me it would be fine because it would
not, because they have things they want from society. They want their
cultural heritage recognised, they want that reflected in their children
and quite rightly so, so you just say: ‘okay, that’s fine, let’s all be white
Europeans’. That is not what the people want. I would not want to move
to an African country and have everybody ignore what my cultural past
was.
(Interview 15)

Yet, at the same time as acknowledging the need for accommodation and
change, Heather was suggesting an equivalence between black people in
Britain and how she would feel as a white person in ‘an African country’.
There was little sense of the impact of colonialism, racism and differential
power relations in this analogy. Interestingly, she also introduced at this point
another form of identification, that of ‘white Europeans’, which seems to be
a strategy for avoiding qualifying English or British with the prefix ‘white’.
Africa again emerged in this account as the ultimate form of difference or
otherness.
Heather and Emma both had an image of Englishness that they were
unable to achieve. Their lived experience fell short of their imagining. Eng-
lishness was maintained as white and middle class, but as such was unlikely
to survive. It was threatened by those outside, by others figured, in the case
of Emma, as the pollution of the urban, and, in the case of Heather, as the
economic, social and political domination of America.