Page 58 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 51
I think I’d started to have that questioning with Joy. And Joy wasn’t
white either. Her dad was African. So yeah, I was very . . . and in that
way there was always something a bit different about me and my sis-
ters.
(Interview 22)

Meeting Joy was presented as marking a distinct rupture from Sally’s fam-
ily; she offered a different way of being, which Sally jumped at. When she
returned to England some months later, the change in her priorities was
made clear: ‘the day I flew back she actually picked me up from the airport
and I went and stayed with her family for 2 weeks, I didn’t even bother to
go home’. In the account, there continued to be an apparently unconscious
parallel narrative of desire as the narrative followed the forms and conven-
tions of a romance. The transgression of racialised norms was heightened
by this echo of the transgression of heterosexual norms. This engagement
with difference, or the other, was clearly marked as liberatory for Sally. In
her essay ‘Eating the other, desire and resistance’, bell hooks has written
about the ‘idea that racial difference marks one as Other and the assumption
that sexual agency expressed within the context of racialised sexual encoun-
ter is a conversion experience that alters one’s place and participation in
contemporary cultural politics’ (hooks 1992: 22). Within the narrative, Sal-
ly’s friendship with Joy was indeed presented as a ‘conversion experience’,
which offered her the possibilities of change and liberation:

She breezed in that day . . . and she just came in like a bit of a breath of
fresh air because she was my age and she was on a similar level, and then
we just got chatting, and she had a similar thing with me. She just thought
I was totally wonderful as well, I mean, it was very . . . for a while we
were really stuck up each other’s backsides . . . we just thought we were
absolutely, you know, wonderful, I think in a way, or we couldn’t quite
believe either of us that we’d met this other person who we just thought
was really great, you know. And it’s probably been like that ever since
although it’s really de-intensified as we’ve got older and, you know, got
on with our own lives. But it was very intense, but nicely I think. I think
at one stage it wasn’t nice; it was almost like I’d almost relied on Joy a
little bit too much. It was like I wanted something from her, probably
some direction with my . . . who I was I’d say, more than where I was
going. So that was quite interesting. For a time, I think we probably
purposely needed a bit of space. But now we’re just on a really, really
nice . . . for the last few years, we’ve been on a really nice level again,
’cos this was about 13, 14 years ago, when I first met her. 13 years ago,
I suppose.
(Interview 22)