Page 62 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 55
her, just endless crises one after another [laugh]. I think probably when I
was eleven and I went to public school which was different from every-
body I knew, that has probably changed the course of my life slightly.
(Interview 44)

The lack of a clear narrative is underlined by the fact that Madeleine did
not provide an account that followed a chronological order. This is not to
suggest, however, that Madeleine was in some sense inarticulate or confused,
but that she did not view her own life experience in a way that enabled
the production of a narrative in this way. One way to understand this is to
examine Madeleine’s relationship to or experience of normative discourses.
At one level, Madeleine’s various positionings as white, middle class and het-
erosexual would seem to suggest privilege and recognition within normative
discourses. Yet she did not feel that she could fit straightforwardly or easily
into those positions. In her childhood, whiteness was a largely unquestioned
norm, although the presence of others was acknowledged:

I mean when I grew up in a suburb in London, I didn’t know anybody
black at all and maybe there were a few Asian families, but there cer-
tainly weren’t any Caribbean families kind of thing. So it was something
I grew up, I didn’t grow up around people of other colours. That was
when I was living in England of course. So, but you know, my mum was
always, she talked to me about race so it was always ‘we will be terribly
nice when we meet people of different colours’ [laugh].
(Interview 9, emphasis Madeleine’s)
Her mother’s attitude clearly fitted into a liberal discourse of tolerance,
which retains white as the norm, and subject, which is defined by its tolerance
and kindness to ‘others’, who are distinguished in gradations of otherness:
‘there certainly weren’t any Caribbean families’. Later in life, Madeleine had
come to reflect on this position, particularly prompted by a relationship with
a West Indian boyfriend who had pointed out some of the ways in which her
position was marked by whiteness, and therefore had a problematic relation-
ship to blackness:

I had a boyfriend for a while who was Jamaican who lived with us for,
oh, a year or so. And . . . he was very . . . active on all sorts of race issues
[. . .] And he would point out to me ...I think I really learnt from him
that it’s not about, . . . that you just have to listen to what other people,
you might not think you’re being racist, you might not think you have
an attitude, but you really have to actually sit down and listen to what
somebody says to you. If somebody comes to you and says ‘look you’re
making me feel in a particular way because of this’ that you’re not even
aware of or ‘I can’t sit down and watch that film with you because it
makes me really uncomfortable because there are no black people in it