Page 85 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

78 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
into racialised discourse. I would suggest that the avoidance or evasion of
‘race’ and particularly its visual ‘markers’, which I will discuss in this section,
is more available to white people than to black people. Certainly (although
this is by no means a statistically significant survey), none of the mothers of
mixed-race children suggested that their children had such empty responses
to colour differences, as the following extract demonstrates:

BB: Do you think that she, does she ever talk about race? Does she
know that it’s a kind of . . .
Madeleine: Well, her dad is, um, half Asian, um so, but she doesn’t look, she
looks like me basically. Although she tans quicker in the sun and
that kind of stuff. So she has been aware from quite an early age
that her dad is a different colour to her. And funnily enough, I
don’t know if this is to do with her relationship with her dad,
but when she was very little she made a very big point of saying
she was white she wasn’t brown, she was white.
BB: That was when she was what kind of age?
Madeleine: Um, God, probably at nursery, probably three, four something
like that.
BB: Because her dad’s not around?
Madeleine: Well, he is, he sees her once a week. But they had, it took quite a
long time for that to become something she would look forward
to, rather than just ‘who is this man?’ [laugh]. So she has, she
also has cousins, who are her dad’s brother’s kids, who are also
at the same school and one of them is white and one of them is
brown. So you know, that’s always been a kind of talking point,
the fact that Rose is . . . because Rose is brown skinned, Rose
does get called names, do you know what I mean when why
doesn’t Emily and why doesn’t Yasmin?
(Madeleine, Interview 9)

Whereas, for Madeleine, ‘race’ and difference were a common family
‘talking point’, the white mothers of white children tended to downplay
those times when their children noticed racialised physical differences or
made comments on ‘race’. They were not sure how to respond to these
incidents, worried perhaps that they were taking the wrong ‘line’. Underly-
ing this was a fear that to see ‘race’ was to be racist. If one could not avoid
seeing difference, one might perhaps avoid talking about it too much with
children.
In the following extract, Jan was responding to a question where I had
asked whether her children noticed differences of ‘race’, class or gender. Jan
responded by addressing the question of gender:

BB: I was going to ask also about, how you think the children, do
they have any understanding or notice differences along the
lines of race, class and gender?