Page 186 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Notes 179
be that Rosemary’s reticence to talk came from an unwillingness to divulge
personal details to me – as a form of resistance even. Certainly, she may have
felt slightly uncomfortable with me and, conscious of these differences, I may
also have been less at ease. However, we were both more relaxed in the second
interview than we had been in the first (helped by the absence of her children).
9 See Cohen (1996) for work on racialised narratives of local areas.

5 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
1 Ruth Frankenberg prefers to use the terms colour or power-evasiveness rather
than colour blindness because the latter ‘deploys and judges negatively a physical
disability, and in part because it is misleading in that this discursive repertoire is
organised around evading difference or acknowledging it selectively rather than
literally not “seeing” differences or race, culture and color’ (Frankenberg 1993:
272, n. 2). While acknowledging the problems with the term, I would suggest
that the concepts of both ‘colour’ and vision or ‘blindness’ are central to the
discussion.
2 See Dyer (1997: 46–8) on white as a colour.
3 Thanks to Naomi Hossein for discussion on this point.
4 There is a serious problem in finding the appropriate terminology to refer to
different racialised positions. This problem becomes particularly clear when
discussing those who are positioned as ‘mixed race’ or of ‘mixed parentage’.
The term ‘mixed race’ gives further credence to ideologies of ‘race’, whereas
reference to ‘mixed parentage’ as a particular position denies the fact that we
are all mixed in terms of being the product of a combination of our parents’
genes. Jayne Ifekwunigwe proposes the term metis (Ifekwunigwe 1997), but I
am hesitant to use a term to describe people that they would not use themselves
or even recognise the meaning of.
5 See Rattansi (1992) and Yuval-Davis (1992) for discussions of multiculturalism.
6 See particularly Yuval-Davis (1992) for a discussion of the dominance of religion
within multicultural education and the racialisation of religion.
7 For further discussion of the imaginary, see Laclau (1990), Bhabha (1994) and
Hesse (1997).
8 See Bonnett (1999) for a review of the relationship between geography and race
studies.
9 Ruth Frankenberg discusses how some of her interviewees had ‘apparently all-
white’ childhoods, which in fact turned out to be populated by many people
who were not white (Frankenberg 1993: 46).

6 In search of a ‘good mix’
1 It could also be argued that there is also gendered exclusion, in the form of
fathers. During the fieldwork, I did not encounter any full-time fathers or men
acting as primary carers. Those that did exist would perhaps have felt uncom-
fortable in the social situations that are discussed in this chapter. In the following
extract, Deborah is discussing one full-time father who used to live locally: ‘I
was always very very conscious of trying to involve him as much as anybody
else, you know, any woman, but then there’s always this sort of, um, I mean,
I didn’t ...I don’t know if he came across it, I’m sure he did, um, a certain
amount of caution . . . It was certainly different talking to him. I’d talk to him
on a completely different level to the way I’d speak to my female friends’ (Inter-
view 17).
2 It is not within the scope of this chapter to consider fully the implications of