Page 81 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

74 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
this logic, every well bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses
adult discourse.
(Morrison 1992: 9–10)

I have argued that ‘race’ needs to be understood as performative and,
more specifically, as a product of perceptual practices. It is through such
perceptual practices that externally evident physical differences are seen and
categorised as racialised differences, and that various inferences are drawn
from these differences. This chapter will explore further the perceptual
practices involved in the performativity of ‘race’, particularly in the context
of talking to white women interviewees who generally wished to avoid ap-
pearing racist. I would argue that the women I interviewed generally worked
within a discourse in which racism, although rarely discussed, was accepted
to be a ‘bad thing’. Yet at the same time, I would argue that they were living
in a time and space that was and is highly racialised and which conditioned
their perceptual practices. Their thoughts and actions were structured by
their whiteness as much as by their class and gender.
In order to explore the ways in which racialised performativity was present
in their lives, this chapter will examine three aspects of the interviews. First,
the discussion with mothers on their children’s attitudes to ‘race’ will pro-
vide a window on the ways in which seeing or not seeing lies at the heart
of racialised perception. Then, I will examine some of the ways in which
‘race’ was raised explicitly by the interviewees and argue that the image of
a masculinised threatening/desired black man retains a dominant position in
the white imaginary. Finally, the chapter will explore another level at which
‘race’ is perceived and experienced by the interviewees – in terms of the
ways they organise their lives spatially and relate to different localities.

‘Race’ in the eye of the beholder (or seeing is believing)
As Paul Gilroy points out ‘when it comes to the visualisation of “race”, a
great deal of fine tuning has been required’ (Gilroy 2000: 42). Acts of seeing
and being seen as racially different are far from simple or inevitable. The
visualisation of ‘race’ needs to be understood as discursively constructed.
Perceptual practices, particularly those centred on visible difference, per-
formatively construct ‘race’. Racial theories are based on physical, visually
determined characteristics that are then related to internal characteristics.
Yet the boundaries between physical characteristics shift and have to be un-
derstood in their social and political context. Who is visibly ‘black’ or ‘white’
changes over time and in different contexts. Thus, questions of visibility and
invisibility are mediated by power. The consequences of either depend upon
the subject’s position within normative regimes.
Visibility and invisibility are both dependent on the acts of seeing and
looking as well as the experience of being seen, unseen or ignored. Patricia
Williams (1997) writes of the tensions around ‘race’, the ‘forbidden gaze’