Page 169 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

162 How English am I?
great pride, I have associations of it with, you know, I associate it with
football hooligans, British beef and the royal family, really. None of
whom I have any particular desire to be associated with [half laugh]
really.
(Interview 30)

When I asked Jan whether her preferring to say British rather than Eng-
lish was an indication that there was something in the English identity that
she was rejecting, she replied ‘I think so, yes. Just a kind of, I think I have, I
think I associate English with being a class thing, I think’. Jan was interested
enough in the question of identity to ask her elder (8-year-old) daughter
whether she thought that she was English or British. Her daughter confi-
dently stated that she was English, to which Jan laughed.
Deborah, who was quoted at the very beginning of this chapter, similarly
associated Englishness with a classed sense of superiority. She was explaining
why she felt it was ‘pedantic’ to call herself English rather than British:

Well, I suppose it is only because I’m just thinking of, you know, received
pronunciation and BBC and, you know, newsreaders and people like
that, who up to a little while ago were all English. They had an English
accent. And I’m just thinking of that as a difference between an English
accent and a Scottish accent, a Welsh accent, an Irish accent . . . I’m just
going back to what we were saying about British and English. Um, but I
certainly don’t think of it as something . . . well, I don’t think of things
like, you know, Scotland as being smaller or Wales as being smaller, or
anything. I mean, I don’t really see – I mean, I just think they’re all Brit-
ish, and if people want a national identity, that’s really important. They
should have it. I mean, I think a lot of connotations of Englishness are
really . . . come from other people. And I think that that in turn has been
an English fault, um, in being rather snooty about other people’s accents
and things, and I think, you know, in that case, maybe the English got
what they deserved, you know. People do see them as slightly ridiculous
maybe abroad, and I’m just thinking immediately of an English person,
you know, that’s like Americans ...a lot of Americans still think we
have fog, and pea-soupers. And it’s really hard to shake that idea off, so
I don’t think I’d see myself as anything but British really, I guess. And, to
be more specific, English.
(Interview 17)

Deborah struggled to decide what she thought Englishness was about and
what it meant to her. It was always an identity that she ended up with, when
being ‘specific’ or ‘pedantic’. Yet she did this with some reservations because
she felt that Englishness may have negative associations. At the same time,
she was unclear as to whether these negative associations were ‘deserved’
or not, and they certainly seemed mostly to come from external representa-