Page 171 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

164 How English am I?
‘Are you English?’ or ‘Are you American?’. And I’d have to go [putting
on accent] ‘No, Dutch’ [laugh]. Yeah because suddenly it was actually
quite, I felt quite threatened, you know because people were genuinely
very angry about it.
(Interview 9)

Madeleine gave a powerful description of empire, in which the British
presence was ubiquitous and an oppressive force: ‘every time you read the
history of anybody else, there are the British . . . enslaving people and shoot-
ing people’. She also had, through her experience of travel, an understanding
of what it might mean to occupy thoughtlessly a dominant position.
Madeleine made little distinction between being British or English and
used the two interchangeably. She was the only interviewee to put Britishness
or Englishness in a truly global frame, rather than one that was restricted to
considerations of Britain’s relationship with Europe and America, or Eng-
land’s relationship with Scotland, Wales and Ireland. For the first time, links
were made between Englishness and empire. Being English meant in some
sense having to bear responsibility for the collective actions of its people and
politicians. This was a ‘weight’ to be carried around. Nonetheless, it was
something that could not necessarily be avoided, even if Madeleine would
‘really rather not’ be British. Madeleine was also one of the few to ques-
tion her own sense of belonging – she saw identification with a nation as
something that was not inevitable but was influenced by different social and
political contexts:

I don’t know this feels a bit clichéd, a bit sad. But the first time I thought
‘I feel really proud to be British’ is when Blair got in on the first of May,
[laugh] it was the first time I thought ‘right I feel good now, I’m part of
the country, I don’t feel like an excluded majority who have no voice
any more’ . . . although I don’t know if I still feel that, but I was excited
in May [laugh] [. . .] And you can actually read about the things that the
government is doing and think ‘Yes that’s a good idea’. I mean not as
many as I’d like, but it is there, which is just amazing really. To actually
feel like you’re part of a community somehow.
(Interview 9)

Madeleine’s membership of Englishness was not contested, at least by
others, only herself. Nonetheless, she did have a sense of being in a col-
lectivity – she was constructing alternative identities, for instance that of the
‘majority’ excluded by political processes. She had also had recourse to other
locational and cultural identities. Madeleine had a strongly urban identity,
which contrasted with the idyll of rural Englishness portrayed by Emma:

Madeleine: um...Well, I suppose I’ve always, I see myself as much more of
a Londoner than English perhaps so I suppose I have that kind of
identity.