Page 8 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

1 Knowing ‘whiteness’

One of the difficulties of being an academic researcher is knowing how much
detail to go into when people ask you about your work. This book is based
on research on a subject which, for many of the people I chatted to, had very
little concrete meaning: that of white experience and identities. This was
particularly true for white people who had no reason to think that their own
experience or identities were racialised in any way. In these casual conversa-
tions, I found that a common response to the idea of studying ‘whiteness’
was to suggest that the really interesting whiteness was somehow ‘out there’,
somewhere else, preferably far away. So it was often suggested that I should
study whiteness in South Africa, in Zimbabwe or in the development aid do-
nor community. All of these would indeed be very interesting and important
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contexts for understanding how ‘race’ structures identity and interaction.
Nonetheless, this book is focused on a context which, for many of those
making these suggestions, was not ‘out there’ but very much at home and
perhaps too close for comfort – that of middle- and working-class white
mothers of young children living in south London.
These conversations can tell us something about whiteness and white
identity. There is often a tendency when thinking about whiteness (and
perhaps most other social phenomena) to look to the extreme and to that
which is seen as ‘different’. Thus, many people can recognise the interest
in understanding whiteness in a situation where white people are in a mi-
nority (therefore different) and/or who exercise extreme power (as in the
recent history of apartheid) or hold extreme views (far-right groups were
also popular suggestions). But the ‘normalness’ of whiteness in Britain does
not hold so much interest. The assumption often is that ‘we’ (everyday white
people in Britain who are not politically racist) cannot be interesting as ‘race’
has nothing to do with us.
This book sets out to examine the racialised experience of a particular
group of white women, living in a specific location and at one moment of
their lives. It takes a group of white people who have not been selected as
extreme examples – people who would consider themselves as ‘normal’ or
‘average’ people – but still asks how they are raced. That is, how are their