Page 27 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

20 Troubling ‘race’
guns and the keys to the jail, of who should be in the jail, and I was
shaped by what I didn’t see, or didn’t notice, on those streets.
(Pratt 1984: 17)

Writing about her adult life, Pratt vividly describes living within a pattern
of repeated practices that only make sense within a certain regulatory regime
and which, through repetition, also serve to shore up certain norms. The
market place she is referring to had been a place of auctioning slaves:

Every day I drove around the market house, carrying my two boys be-
tween home and grammar school and day care. To me it was an impedi-
ment to the flow of traffic, awkward, anachronistic. Sometimes in early
spring light it seemed quaint. I had no knowledge and no feeling of the
sweat and blood of people’s lives that had been mortared into its bricks:
nor of their independent joy apart from that place. What I was feeling
was that I would spend the rest of my life going round and round in
a pattern that I knew by heart: being a wife, a mother of two boys, a
teacher of the writings of white men, dead men. I drove around the
market house four times a day, travelling on the surface of my own life:
circular, repetitive.
(Pratt 1984: 21–2)

Pratt is describing these experiences from a position in which she is no
longer repeating them or at least not in the same way. In becoming a lesbian,
she discovered what it felt like to be outside the norm: ‘I had learned that I
could be either a lesbian or a mother of my children, either in the wilderness
or on holy ground, but not both’ (Pratt 1984: 26). This new positioning
had led Pratt to challenge the way she was positioned not only as a woman
but also as white. This is not just a matter of external imposition but also
involves internal processes for Pratt.
Pratt might perhaps express more optimism than Butler about the ability
self-consciously to change one’s identity and positioning (for a critique of
Butler’s approach to agency, see McNay 1999). Nonetheless, I think that
this highly personalised account does help to draw out some of the concerns
of Butler’s work. Pratt’s work suggests the need to re-examine that which is
unseen and unquestioned in experience and subject construction. She also
accounts for some of the functioning of discursive construction of norms
and their regulation through practice. The following section will take up the
question of racialised perceptual practices, examining in detail one of the
ways in which race is performative.

Perceptual practices and the performativity of ‘race’
Pratt’s account begins, as I have said, with a description of the different ways
in which she is hailed and spoken to, as well as of her fears of how she might
be spoken of. She also writes of different ways of seeing and being seen.