Page 42 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Talk, tea and tape recorders 35
mean, as a white person, I want to see what [you’re getting at], you know’
(Hope, Interview 5).
In this interview, Hope constantly referred to herself and put her experi-
ence in the context of being ‘a black woman’ and also explicitly positioned
me as ‘a white woman’. In contrast, in interviews where there was a class
difference between myself and that of the interviewees, this was not dealt
with so explicitly, either by me or by the interviewees. In only a very few
situations did class constitute the kind of context-setting, explicit identity
that people would refer to themselves as either ‘a middle-class woman’ or ‘a
working-class woman’. Without this explicit positioning, it was difficult to
acknowledge class position. Mariam Fraser discusses how class may not be
amenable to a politics of visibility because of the way in which people may
be reluctant to identify as working class (Fraser 1999: 126). In fact, this was
impossible for those who adopted very strongly class-blind discourses. For
example, Rosemary, a working-class woman, is signalling in the following
extract that she is not ‘posh’, but in such a way that discourages further
discussion of class. She is responding to a question about whether issues of
class or race come up with her children much:

No we don’t talk about that. I mean class, personally, we’re the same as
everyone, you know. You either like us or you don’t. But we get on with
everyone, there’s not any people that we say ‘oh no, we don’t get on
with them, no they’re too posh, no they’re this colour, that colour’.
(Interview 14)

This first interview with Rosemary was markedly more stilted and awk-
ward than with other people, which was not helped by a time pressure, as
she only had a short time for the interview, and the audience provided by
her children. But I certainly felt that class played a large part in her reticence.
The second interview was more relaxed. However, in both interviews with
Rosemary, she seemed to feel the most conscious, among all the interview-
ees, about the presence of the tape-recorder. In the first interview, she asked
me to switch off the tape-recorder (so she could express more forcefully
some of her views of ‘Africans’). In the second interview, in the middle of an
account of a difficult pregnancy, she asked the tape-recorder ‘do you want to
hear that?’. This seemed to be referring to someone superior to me, perhaps
an assumed male supervisor (who would not want to know gynaecologically
related medical details) and who could absorb some of the awkwardness
of the situation – even though I had told her that no-one else would listen
directly to the tapes, although I might quote from them.
Other working-class interviewees did talk more explicitly about class dif-
ferences. However, in contrast to the conversations with Hope, in which
we were both happy to refer to my positioning as a white woman, in these
discussions of class, my own middle classness was not mentioned. Which
is of course far from saying that it was not present in the conversations