Page 83 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

76 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
apart from the occasional reference to cross-dressing and how it was ‘really
nothing to worry about’.
But there was less consensus on the subject of ‘race’. ‘Race’ was something
that the mothers were less used to talking about and had widely varying views
on the perceptual practices of their babies, toddlers and young children.
Different interviewees felt that quite old children had no sense of visible
racialised differences whereas, as we shall see, others ascribed a sense of dif-
ference to very young children. While this could be the result of the different
ways in which the children are brought up and their different development,
I would argue that the question is less about what children actually see and
more about what their mothers think they see, or want them to see. Seeing
and talking about ‘race’ was a difficult and awkward practice for many of
these women. Part of the explanation for this was that, for those mothers
whose children are positioned as white (in contrast to those who described
their children as ‘mixed race’), ‘race’ was always about others, those who
were black, Asian or otherwise non-white. There was no discussion of their
children’s own racial identities. This meant that seeing racialised difference
and remarking on it became a practice of power, of labelling others (while
of course unconsciously labelling oneself). For some of the women I inter-
viewed, both the act of seeing and the notion of colour lay at the heart of
their attitude to ‘race’ and whiteness. The safest action was to do nothing,
1
or risk being seen as racist. For these women, colour blindness functioned
literally as a claim to be blind to – unseeing of – colour, where colour means
2
blackness or non-whiteness. This also meant that, unlike gender, where
they might consciously choose appropriate books and toys for their children
to guide their development, they did not consciously play a role in direct-
ing their children’s vision and understanding. It would seem that there was
nothing for a parent to do but to step back and keep quiet. Seeing racialised
differences is clearly much more contentious and complicated than seeing
gender differences.
Heather was the only interviewee who was prepared to suggest that her
baby had a strong reaction to the visual impact of racialised physical differ-
ences and skin tone in particular:

Heather: I’ve just got one, and she’s 10 months – although you do get an
interesting reaction that she definitely . . . we have a couple of
black friends but not a lot of . . . so she tends to stare at black
people.
BB: Really . . .
Heather: Because they’re different, so she’s aware there’s something dif-
ferent. We had a guy come round to do a survey – we seem to be
on everyone’s survey list, and he was, I think he was probably
Nigerian ’cos he was very, very dark, you know, with that al-
most navy blue, it’s so black, and she was absolutely transfixed.
Completely fascinated because it was different, it was something