Page 47 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

40 Talk, tea and tape recorders
10,000 words), I then felt in a much stronger position to explore similarities,
differences and resonances across cases, as well as to analyse some interviews
in even more depth.
The rest of the book is the product of this analysis, based on an in-depth
knowledge of the accounts that the interviewees gave. In order to explore
how their experiences were racialised, classed and gendered, and how dis-
courses are reproduced within interviews, it was necessary to approach the
analysis in many different ways and at different levels. What emerged as a
result of the analysis was sometimes different from my impression during
and immediately after the interviews. At times during the fieldwork, I felt
that the interviews were ‘boring’ or yielding little useful material. However,
my impression of what was significant within interviews changed consider-
ably once the analysis had been completed. What might have seemed empty
of content could emerge as a series of complex evasions or silences. Not
only content, but also form is important. But more significantly, whereas
I sometimes feared that there would be nothing to discuss but silences and
evasions, close attention to the interviews revealed the degree to which the
accounts were in fact explicitly classed and raced. In addition, repetitions
and resonances between different accounts can be frustrating when conduct-
ing interviews, but become fascinating for identifying common discursive
constructions and important features of a social imaginary.
The citation of racialised and classed discourses is sometimes so ubiqui-
tous that it takes careful reading to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ it. And of course, in this
case, the ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ is done by an individual who is limited by
having a subject position similar to those whose accounts she is analysing.
I do not want to enter here into debates around the benefits or otherwise
of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ status, as these have perhaps been overworked
and have the risk of essentialising the notion of community, which one can
only be either inside or outside. It is, however, fair to say that, after study-
ing and working in the area of development studies, and influenced by the
black feminist writers mentioned in Chapter 1, I was politically drawn to the
idea of rejecting the position of being the white researcher who ‘knows’ and
studies ‘the other’. I have not chosen to research myself, but have chosen to
research those who are quite like myself. This, however, has various pitfalls,
not least of which is that white people are long trained in colour blindness 15
– that is, the inability to see the impact of racist processes on their lives and
the lives of others. Thus, a white researcher is unlikely to be the most adept
analyst of whiteness and white privilege. Despite this, in order to conform to
the individualistic goalpost structured within the academy, I have produced
a sole-authored text and taken the authoritative position suggested by the
word ‘author’. This inevitably reduces the politics and potential of the work
as bell hooks argues:

One change in that direction that would be real cool would be the pro-
duction of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness. It would just