Page 82 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 75
of ‘race’ and what one is ‘cultured to see or not see’. To see or not to see
‘race’ or difference is a politicised act. It is an act which, as the interview
material shows, is riven with doubts and confusion for the white women.
In the interviews I carried out for the research, the issue of ‘seeing’ ‘race’
or colour came up when I asked the mothers whether they thought their
children (both preschool and primary school age) had any understanding
of ‘race’. This question was designed to prompt the women to talk in a way
that would illuminate their own thinking on ‘race’. At the same time, I also
asked similar questions about class and gender. In the rest of this section, I
will focus on the question of seeing ‘race’ and, more specifically, on how the
white respondents talked about seeing, or not seeing, those who were not
white, and what they thought their children saw. Children are an interest-
ing place to start in this discussion. In general, it is assumed that children
are ‘innocent’ of racism. However, there may be different positions on the
‘naturalness’ of attraction towards one’s own and suspicion of others. How
one’s ‘own’ is defined and who is the other are of course critical. In addition,
children are also discovering the world around them and rapidly developing
and being interpellated into wider discursive practices. They are engaged in
the process of working out frameworks through which to view the world.
Mothers play an active role in shaping this process.
There was little consensus between the mothers on the development of
their children’s understandings of the concept of ‘race’ or their own racial-
ised identities. This contrasted strongly with what the mothers said about
gender. Many of the interviewees gave lengthy responses to questions about
their children’s gender development and their understanding of gender
differences. In the vast majority of cases, the interviewees stated that they
wanted to bring up their children ‘equally’ or without reference to gender
stereotypes and that, to this end, they endeavoured to buy a wide range of
books and toys for their children to play with. Almost all the mothers also
stated that these attempts were futile and, in the face of girls’ desire to wear
pink or boys’ desires to play with sticks, cars and trains, were eventually
abandoned. This is illustrated in the following anecdote told by Deborah, a
middle-class woman living in Clapham:

A friend of mine took part in this sort of survey that a friend of hers was
doing to find out how you could influence boys and girls, and she had to
give her son girls’ toys to play with, dolls. A doll’s house, and she said
it was ridiculous. The doll was used as a soldier, and the doll’s house
was used as a fort, and he just got behind the doll’s house and started
shooting people through the windows and things. You know, she said,
‘well, yeah, what can I do?’.
(Interview 17)

Traditional gender categories were usually accepted and used totally
unproblematically by the interviewees, with sexuality not mentioned at all,