Page 180 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Conclusion 173
gender, there are few culturally familiar narratives of the experience of be-
coming aware of (coming to terms with?) one’s whiteness. However, in a
similar way, talking about class was also avoided in many instances.
One response to the difficulty of knowing what areas of ‘race’ talk were
permissible was to skirt around the issue with various discourses that served
to recirculate and reiterate racialised concepts without being directly labelled
as such. Thus, multiculturalism proved to be a flexible discourse as it could
be used positively, in the idea of wanting children to have an ‘exposure’ to
difference that might enrich their lives. However, this still ensured the fixity
of the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’, the norm and the other. But there
was also a cautionary element to this idea of exposure, which emphasised
the need to achieve the right ‘mix’ in order to ensure the best socialisation
for children. The risk of ‘overexposure’ was perhaps always present. Class
difference was also a shadowy presence in this discourse. Both class and race
could also be alluded to through geographical location depending on the
assumption of a shared understanding of areas having particular racialised
and classed characteristics.
Other ideas of location and locatedness were expressed through discus-
sions of national identity. By exploring imaginings of Englishness, Chapter 7
was able to examine how the women responded to and inserted themselves
into public discourses of nationhood and belonging. At the level of national
identity, it was possible to see how definitions and imaginings of the collec-
tive were produced through constructions of different ‘others’. This was
most straightforward in the case of those who took up a nostalgic, defensive
imagining of Englishness, where it was contrasted to a negative construction
of ‘Britishness’, to Americanness and to racialised others. Here, Englishness
was posited as white, middle class and rural and under threat from differ-
ence, including the racialised urban space in which the women lived. For
others, Englishness was an empty concept, much like whiteness, where other
people had culture and exciting difference leaving Englishness empty and
seemingly bereft. Finally, some interviewees saw Englishness as defined by
nationalists and racists and therefore something to be evaded wherever pos-
sible. What was interesting was the limited extent to which the interviews
made explicit recourse to public discourses of national identity of the kind
that politicians and others promote. Rather, their narratives of identity and
imaginings of belonging were formed around personal experiences and tra-
jectories. This indicates the extent to which public, collective identities are
read through the personal.
Ways of seeing and talking were not the only racialised practices that
emerged through the interviews. The act of coming to London, settling
down and being in a particular place was experienced as racialised as well
as classed and gendered. In Chapter 6, I argued how practices involved in
mothering can be understood as performative of ‘race’, class and gender.
Not only is mothering an inescapably gendered activity, but the mothers also
discussed the large extent to which they saw their work as gendering. That
is, ensuring that their children were equipped to enter a social universe that