Page 84 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 77
new, which was what babies absolutely love, so it was interesting
to see that they are aware, that people look different [. . .] You
know, it’s very obvious, it’s like she’d stare at somebody with
glasses or at somebody that had very, very bleached blonde hair
or something. They’d all be things that would be eye-catching to
her, so that she would, you know, comment on it in her way.
(Interview 15)

Heather did feel the need to assert her baby’s innocence – the attention
she gives to black people is no different from that she would give to someone
blonde or wearing glasses. The fact that she said this suggests that she had
some anxiety about it – as if I might suspect that her 10-month-old daughter
was harbouring racial ideologies. Although, at the same time, she suggested a
possible social explanation, in that part of her daughter’s interest was due to
the infrequency of her daughter meeting people who have darker skin than
herself. Certain differences are more ‘eye-catching’ than others. Other inter-
viewees, whose children also commented on racialised physical differences,
were also at pains to point out the lack of racism behind these comments.
Asking about the colour of a person was the same as asking about the colour
of a toy only ‘probably even more interesting’ (Interview 17), or comment-
ing on someone’s skin colour ‘that’s just the same as them saying they’ve
got blonde hair’ (Interview 20). It is interesting how, in these two examples,
what comes to mind as a contrast to blackness is blonde hair. This could be
argued to be an iconic formulation of white femininity. 3
In contrast, Claudia, who described herself and her daughter as ‘half
black’, discussed her daughter’s fascination for blondeness:
4
She had a fixation for a long time about dyeing her hair blonde. [. . .] It’s
beyond us, it’s kind of beyond us. Because she’s always, she’s got more
black dollies than she’s got white dollies, but she adores Barbie. I just
don’t know where . . . she just from a very early age got into her head
that blonde is good. I mean her best friend who she’s played with since
she was about one and a half is blonde and she’s always adored him. But
then she’s made friends, you know, ...I don’t know where she’s got it
from, we just don’t know. And now she’s got it as a bit of a joke, to say
‘oh I’m going to dye my hair blonde like Barbie’.
(Interview 6)

Another interviewee, whose daughter had a ‘half-Asian’ father, also said
that her daughter had a fascination with blonde hair. These examples are
not presented here to support the problematic literature on the ‘problem’
of black and mixed-race identity (for a discussion of this, see Tizard and
Phoenix 1993), but rather to suggest the dominance of certain forms of
whiteness in ideals of femininity and beauty. Nonetheless, I would also argue
that the act of seeing ‘race’ depends on how the individual is interpellated