Page 168 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 161
Again, Englishness was bound up both with whiteness and with middle/up-
per classness, and heritage could only be represented by stately homes and
national trust properties. It was not something to which Liz had a particu-
larly strong identification, beyond remarking, in a similar way to that used
by Helen above, that she was ‘rooted’ in this country.

Evading Englishness
The ambiguity about being English may come not so much from a feeling
that it is an empty identity with little heritage or tradition to offer, but from
a negative response to what is regarded as Englishness. In this construction
of Englishness, there is a rejection, and perhaps an attempt to be something
other than what you are. Both Les Back and Ann Phoenix in their separate
research found young people who were attempting to vacate Englishness.
Les Back found that, in some areas of his research: ‘young whites vacate
whiteness and Englishness as appropriate identities in favour of an encoded
identification with blackness and black people’ (Back 1996: 135). This par-
ticular form of trying to find identities that are not ‘laced with racism’ is
located within a specific classed and often gendered youth culture and is
not necessarily open to all. It may also be difficult to sustain. Ann Phoenix
found that ‘[d]iscomfort on the part of white young people could be warded
off by viewing ethnicity and nationality as optional and voluntary. From this
perspective, young black people were perceived as having more choice than
young white people about opting into or out of Englishness’ (Phoenix 1995:
35). I would argue that, for the women I interviewed, options such as ‘en-
coded identification with blackness and black people’ were not particularly
viable options, rooted as they are in youth cultures. However, some of the
interviewees did express negative associations with Englishness and their
own reservations about holding such an identity.
Jan, a white middle-class woman who had worked as a teacher, preferred
to think of herself as British rather than English (which perhaps involved
ignoring the devolutionist demands of the Scots and Welsh). She was also
very dubious about the whole endeavour of national identity ‘I want to be
part of a United Kingdom, I suppose. You know, with Scotland, Wales and
things as well, I don’t just want to be ...I do have friends who insist that
they’re English, not just British. And it’s all to do with things like English
beef and I don’t know. I don’t know really. I don’t have a very strong feeling
of nationality at all to be honest’ (Jan, Interview 30). Despite the fact that
Jan ‘can’t imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else’, she was suspicious of
the feeling of national belonging and identification. England may not have
been something to be particularly proud of, or somewhere that had positive
identifications for her, but it was at least familiar in contrast to unknown and
potentially more unpleasant places. Yet at the same time, Jan pointed out:

I’ve no really kind of national identity. I’m quite ashamed of, you know,
whenever I see the Union Jack, I don’t personally have any feeling of