Page 187 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

180 Notes
social mobility. Steph Lawler emphasises the pain and sense of estrangement
associated with movement from a working- to a middle-class position (Lawler
1999).
3 Inevitably, the material and discussion in this chapter rely on the accounts of the
mothers. I did not have access to wider family discussions in which, no doubt,
fathers would participate and where they might provide a very different perspec-
tive. It is interesting to note, however, that while the interviewees referred to
discussions that they had had with other mothers, relatively few references were
made to their partners taking part in decision-making around schooling.
4 The names of the schools have been changed.
5 See also Reay (1999) for a discussion of working-class women’s sense of intimi-
dation in dealing with school authorities.
6 This is a similar case of the overvisualisation of black children to that of Liz in
the last chapter, who realised when she examined a school photograph closely
that her daughter’s class had far fewer black students than she had previously
thought.
7 Teresa’s protestation that she was not suggesting something ‘unreasonable’ and
my attempt to occupy a non-judgemental position show that Teresa knew that
this was a politically sensitive area.
8 In 1997, according to Lambeth educational statistics, 60.8 per cent of school
pupils were Christian, another 18 per cent had ‘no religion’ and 10.9 per cent
were unclassified. The largest religious minorities were Muslims (at 7.2 per cent)
and Hindus (at 1.2 per cent).

7 How English am I?
1 This title is adapted from the title of an article by James Donald, which is in
turn an adaptation of the title of the novel How German is it? by Walder Abish
(Donald 1993).
2 See for example Nairn (1981), Wright (1985), Colls and Dodd (1986), Crick
(1991), Kearney (1991), Colley (1992), Cohen (1994), Jones (1998), Paxman
(1998) and Kumar (2003).
3 The interviews took place between June 1997 and March 1998.
4 See Binnie and Skeggs (2004) for a useful discussion of cosmopolitan spaces.
5 See in particular C. Hall (1992), Ware (1992) and McClintock (1995).
6 Except in the instance of linguistics where black English or ‘Blinglish’ is a more
familiar concept.
7 This reference to ‘the gypsies’ was prompted by reports in the newspapers in the
week of the interview about Roma asylum seekers fleeing discrimination in East-
ern Europe – or coming as ‘economic migrants’ and seeking benefit payments,
depending on which interpretation was followed.
8 See for example Roger Hewitt’s accounts of racist jokes (Hewitt 1996).
9 See also Dyer (1997: 75–6).
10 See Cohen (1988).
11 See Bhabha (1990a).

8 Conclusion
1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4347369.stm (downloaded
2/04/05).
2 See the newspaper article in defence of the report ‘Get your facts right first
please’ by Runnymede Trust Chair, Samir Shah, in the Guardian (20/10/00).