Page 86 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 79
Jan: Um, yes, very depressingly they do, depressing in some senses.
Hugo is, well four, he’s in the nursery year, he’s full of things
about what’s girls’ things and what’s boys things. I must ad-
mit, I was standing in the queue at our local department store
this Christmas with my Action Man and my pink secret diary
thinking ‘where did it all go wrong, all those ideas that I had!’.
Never letting Zoe have a doll and playing Duplo for hours and
hours and making ‘constructive’ things. And now there’s a pile
of Barbies, I don’t know, seems like a lot of ...I don’t know. I
still have some principles that I hold to heart, no guns and that
sort of thing.
(Interview 30)

This marked the beginning of quite a long discussion in which Jan de-
scribed the work she had put into developing her children’s gender identi-
ties: ‘I feel I’ve failed in that respect [. . .] Having said that, I don’t think I’ve
done that badly when I look at some kids’. She discussed training her son
away from ‘overtly aggressive behaviour’ and trying to teach her daughter to
be more competitive. She also mentioned her ambivalent feelings about her
daughter’s fascination with the Spice Girls (there is further discussion of this
in the next chapter). After this long exchange, from which it was clear that
Jan had thought considerably about gender and worked to achieve certain
gendered identities for her children, I again tried to explore ‘race’ and class.
This introduced a discussion of class. Jan was one of the few interviewees
who felt that her child noticed differences that could be regarded as classed,
such as accent:

BB: So, do you find that they do, you know, notice any differences in
race or class, other than the gender one? Do they remark on it?
Jan: Zoe remarks on accents a bit. Just occasionally, one lad had
come in the school and it was November, and they always wear,
I don’t know why it happens really sometimes, but they weren’t
allowed to wear jogging bottoms outside, they had to just wear
their shorts. And this woman had come in, Peter is the name of
the son. Zoe had come home one day and she does this fantastic
mimic of people’s voices. And it is very tempting, you don’t
know whether you can laugh or not really. [mimicking ‘cockney’
accent] ‘Come over here, I’ve told you, they’re freezing to death
out there, I’m not having my Peter . . .’. I just burst out laughing
because I knew Peter’s mum and I just knew that it was just a
dead rip-off of her accent. So certainly that she would be aware.
But I wouldn’t, I would say she’s very unaware of people’s class,
social status. Doesn’t really make comments about people edu-
cating privately or state or anything. I really don’t think she’s
very ..., or the size of someone’s house , you know, that’s
where people live. She thinks that living in a flat with a balcony