Page 87 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

80 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
would be very glamorous for example, so you know she’s a bit
unaware on that front. Race is an interesting one, I think be-
cause ..., I don’t know . . .. I mean, you know, she’s very ...,
the school that she goes to, they do have a problem with kids
leaving, going to this other school basically. It’s been more in the
last couple of years because they haven’t had a head.
(Interview 30)

There was some hesitation in what Jan is saying. She was skirting round
the issue of knowledge in relation to difference. On two occasions, she was
about to classify her daughter in relation to her awareness of difference, first
as regards class ‘I really don’t think she’s very . . .’ and then ‘race’ ‘I mean,
you know, she’s very . . .’. In both instances, Jan diverted the course of her
own account. What she seems to be avoiding saying was how aware or not
her daughter was about class or ‘race’. The implication is that to have an
awareness of these differences would be to be prejudiced. In the latter part
of her quotation, it appears at first that she is adopting a strategy of veering
off the subject of ‘race’ again as she shifted from ‘race’ to the administrative
problems of her children’s primary school and the class differences between
schools. However, it is clear that ‘race’ was central to some of her preoc-
cupations about the school, and that this was mediated through class. What
became apparent in the interview is that the problem with children leav-
ing is that it is the middle-class (and white) children who tend to leave the
school, making the upper reaches of the school progressively ‘blacker’, as
Jan explained:
Um, and so, having kind of gone from a situation where you’ve probably
got, I’d say . . . 30 per cent black kids in the school, by the time you
get to year six, you’re looking at about 75 per cent black kids in the
school.
(Interview 30)

The question of mothers’ racialised attitudes to their children’s schooling
and the question of ‘mix’ will be explored more fully in the next chapter.
In the interview, Jan went on to stress that her 8-year-old daughter (and
younger son) are less interested in ‘race’ than she is herself:

I don’t think either of them really comment on it really. I suppose I’m
more interested in it than they are really. Um, very occasionally, Phoebe
will be describing someone and she’ll say, it’s never the first factor in the
description, but she’ll say ‘oh she’s got black skin’. But she’ll usually say,
‘oh she’s that big girl with really frizzy hair’, or ‘she’s that big girl with
the silver coat’ or something. . . . um... and at some point she might
say that she’s got black skin or whatever. But there aren’t really any
obvious differences as to what the kids do and the way they perform at