Page 26 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Troubling ‘race’ 19
state her whiteness. She is hailed as a white woman and can only respond as
a white woman. Pratt first gives an example of a comforting, positive (as she
sees it) recognition and speaking. Walking in an area in Washington in which
white people are relatively rarely seen, she reports being acknowledged and
accepted:

When I walk by, if I lift my head and look towards them and speak,
‘Hey’, they may speak, say ‘Hey’ or ‘How you doing?’ or perhaps just
nod. In the spring I was afraid to smile when I spoke, because that might
be too familiar, but by the end of the summer I had walked back and
forth so often, I was familiar, so sometimes we shared comments about
the mean weather. I am comforted by any of these speakings, for, to tell
you the truth, they make me feel at home.
(Pratt 1984: 11)

But other encounters are less comfortable and are more painfully and ex-
plicitly racialised. She gives the example of encounters with the janitor who
works in her building:

When we meet in the hall or on the elevator, even though I may just have
heard him speaking in his own voice to another man, he ‘yes ma’am’s’me
in a sing-song: I hear my voice replying in the horrid cheerful accents of
a white lady: and I hate my white womanhood that drags between us the
long bitter history of our region.
(Pratt 1984: 12)
The way she is acknowledged, the way she responds, both inform each other
and draw on different norms and ways of being. They suggest different ways
of being a middle-class white woman, drawing on different discursive and
historical circumstances. To step out of these citations of the norm is pain-
ful, where it is possible at all: ‘By the amount of effort it takes me to walk
these few blocks being as conscious as I can of myself in relation to history,
to race, to culture, to gender, I reckon the rigid boundaries set around my
experience, how I have been “protected”’ (Pratt 1984: 13).
Pratt’s account gives some insight into the regulatory regimes that posi-
tioned her and shaped her sense of self and her practices. It is shaped by her
gendered positioning, which means that she fails to live up to her father’s ex-
pectations. She describes being taken as a child to the roof of the courthouse
in the centre of her town by her father and being too scared to climb on to
it: ‘But I was not him: I had not learned to take that height, that being set
apart as my own: a white girl, not a boy’ (Pratt 1984: 16). Her relationship
to the town is also constructed through her whiteness:

I was shaped by my relation to those buildings and to the people in the
buildings, by ideas of who should be working in the Board of Education,
of who should be in the bank handling money, of who should have the