Page 179 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

172 Conclusion
ethnic and racialised difference. For many, to notice racialised difference
was to risk allowing racism to bubble to the surface and therefore the best
option was not to see. Being colour blind might be understood literally, as
in the case of their children who they often asserted did not see skin colour
differences, or metaphorically, when children and adults are described as not
being prejudiced. But this does not mean that ‘race’ did not register in their
perceptual schemas, or that they did not have emotional responses to racial-
ised differences. One result was the potential overvisualisation of racialised
others. Black faces in school assemblies or photographs sometimes seemed
to obliterate the white faces that were also there. In addition, young black
men appeared to loom large in the social imaginary as a threatening presence
on the racialised space of the street.
Discussions of difference were sometimes diverted from those of skin
colour to that of ‘cultural’ difference, which was, however, often marked
by visual signifiers (such as saris) or by language, names and accents. This
produced a discourse of ‘exposure’ to difference which maintained the
unexplored whiteness as the norm bounded by those who dress or name
themselves differently. Thus, this shift from skin or ‘race’ to culture marked
a recitation of racialised discourses, again often functioning around the
visible, but on slightly different grounds. It was marked by a mixture of
desire and unease, which appeared in different ways through many of the
interviews. While whiteness was largely undiscussed, it was at the same time
defined through difference. Some of these differences were constructed as
things to be celebrated and embraced. In some cases, there was even a sug-
gestion of envy that ‘others’ had richer and more interesting customs and
cultures. Yet at the same time, difference could also produce a sense of risk
and threat. In the case of the trope of the black male, as mentioned above,
this might be a physical threat, whereas in the discussion of schools, friend-
ships and Englishness, the threat was less directly to the body and indicated
a vulnerability of the respondents’ own, or children’s, identities and sense of
self. The normative nature of whiteness needed to be constantly protected.
One way in which whiteness was constructed was through the summoning
up of a gendered and racialised ‘other’, in the form of the threatened and/or
desired black male. White femininity was produced through this imagining
as under threat and also tempted.
Not only was seeing ‘race’ an anxious process, but this carried through to
racialised and racialising talk. The material has shown how there is no single
way to tell or narrate the white self. The production or non-production
of a narrative of the self is the result of a complex interaction of classed,
gendered and racialised processes. Not all white subjects have the same sense
of agency or sense of coherence in their self-narratives, and some found
available discourses of the self inadequate for describing their own experi-
ences. Most of the interviewees displayed an awkwardness in talking about
‘race’. Generally, ‘race’ was something that pertained to others and, in this
way, it contrasted with class and gender, which could be, perhaps to different
degrees, inhabited by the respondents. Unlike with class, and particularly