Page 63 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

56 Narrating the self
at all and you aren’t aware of that. And that isn’t an issue for you yet
it’s a really big issue for me’. . . So that was quite, um, I don’t know, I’d
never thought of myself as a racist person, I’d always thought of myself
as someone who was very open. And I think being with him I had to
accept that just the way I’d been brought up and my culture there were
things that I did that were actually very racist, without me intending
them to be.
(Interview 9)

As a result, Madeleine was now much more aware of how the social world
in which she operates was racialised – even to the extent that it had be-
come something of an issue (although not very significant) with her current
partner: ‘a white bloke who’s from the home counties and he thinks I’m
really over the top about it [race]’. This was not always an easy awareness to
have. Madeleine echoed Minnie Bruce Pratt, who (as discussed in Chapter 2)
writes of the ‘amount of effort it takes me to walk these few blocks being
conscious as I can of myself in relation to history, to race, to culture, to
gender’ (Pratt 1984: 13):

...I don’t know, I suppose I’m more sensitive about it. I suppose be-
cause I’ve had to look at all those issues in such minute detail. I’m really
aware that I might be being racist without intending to [laugh]. It’s made
me really un-relaxed about the whole thing [laugh]. Yeah um ...I think
that’s definitely it, because I’ve had to . . . because it’s been such an is-
sue, I’m very very aware of it now and I wouldn’t have been so aware of
it before, I’d have been more relaxed about it.
(Interview 9)

This sensitisation towards her own racialised positioning did not perhaps
fit so readily into a transformative story as Sally’s account of classed trans-
formation. Stories of ‘becoming aware of one’s whiteness’ are not (yet?) so
established as those of moving from a working-class to middle-class posi-
tion (see Lawler 2002). In terms of class, Madeleine had the experience of
confounding expectations, those of her parents and perhaps her own. She
described herself, and particularly some of the attitudes she has passed on to
her daughter, as middle class:

I always think that the thing that makes me middle class is the fact that,
one, I had a good education, and two, I have that kind of belief that
I might be poor at the moment, I won’t always be poor, because I’m
clever, because I can, because I never think: ‘I can’t take that opportu-
nity because that’s not meant for me’. You know, anything is open to
me... and I don’t know whether that’s necessarily . . . kind of a classic
middle-class attitude, but I think that’s probably something that, that’s
what she gets from me. That’s the kind of class thing that she gets from