Page 80 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 73
Helen: Totally, absolutely, completely different, yeah. Where I live, I
actually went to a school which was 20 miles away from where I
lived. Which is another thing I don’t want my children to have.
I want them to go to a school that’s round the corner and to be
able to see their friends after school. For me that just wasn’t an
option. I used to catch three buses to get to school, every morn-
ing. I used to leave home at 20 past 7 to get to school at quarter
to 9, from the age of 11. It’s just too much, I wouldn’t want my
children . . ., and all my friends lived miles away, so as I said it
was just staying over, it was a bigger deal than just going for tea,
I missed out on that completely. And in the summer, a lot of the
time I was just on my own. My brother and sister are a lot older
than me, so in a way I was an only child. And the racial mix
was completely . . . my parents I would say had become middle
class, but say for example, both my grandfathers were miners.
One was a lead miner and one was a coal miner and very much
working class. They decided that they didn’t want their own
children from fairly enormous families to become miners. And
so they moved from, down to the valley, if you like and the
whole family clubbed together and bought a farm.
(Helen, Interview 12)

Helen initially appeared to answer the question about ‘race’ directly and
even emphatically. But she found it difficult to sustain a discussion on ‘race’
and went on to explain other features of her childhood environment and
geography. Nonetheless, ‘race’ is implicated in her account of her family’s
history and class position. She was describing a social geography which
is raced, in that it is almost completely, but not entirely, white. However,
Helen could not quite find the words to say this directly; she approached the
question ‘And the race mix was completely . . .’ but lost courage at the final
hurdle and diverted away from it. It appears here, and in other interviews,
that ‘white’ is even more of a taboo word, more difficult to say, than ‘black’
or ‘Asian’. The most interesting feature of her childhood for Helen was its
classed nature. Class, geography and family were all of more immediate rel-
evance and interest to her than ‘race’. They are also easier to talk about. This
extract illustrates both the seeming irrelevance of ‘race’ to white lives and
some of the reluctance on the part of some white people to talk about ‘race’.
Toni Morrison has also written about this delicacy, although in her case she
is referring to white American literary critics:

The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous
liberal gesture. To notice is to recognise an already discredited differ-
ence. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body
a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to