Page 88 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 81
school. And they have got some black teachers at school, which is good.
And she has one or two black friends that come home for tea. But in the
main, her friends are a group of white girls. And I suppose that kind of
bothers me a bit. But then those white girls have got white mums that
are my friends, that’s the way it is, I mean.
(Interview 30)

Despite feeling happy to express her own interest in ‘race’, there was still
an unease in her daughter’s seeing, expressed through the insistence that her
daughter only ever refers to the skin colour of fellow classmates as secondary
descriptors. However, it is ironic that the other descriptors that she mentions
– particularly the ‘frizzy hair’ – are racialised. It seems likely that Jan was
summoning up a black child in her imagination as she produced these exam-
ples. Jan then shifted back to her own preoccupation about whether there
are obvious racialised differences in what children do, how they perform at
school and her anxieties about her children not achieving a desirable social
‘mix’. It is interesting that Jan did have higher aspiration for her children’s
racialised mixing than her own social life, although she ultimately recognised
that the two were intertwined.
Given multicultural discourses and, I would argue, the racialisation of
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culture, it was easier for parents to suggest that their children might notice
cultural difference than visual markers of ‘race’. The women mentioned the
‘different cultural outlooks’, ‘different names’, ‘different diets’ and ‘saris’
that their children might notice as well as, inevitably, the different religious
festivals. The following extract introduces the discourse of exposure, which
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was alluded to in Jan’s concern about her children’s friends and appeared in
several other interviews. Stephanie was talking about her 3-year-old son:
He makes absolutely no comment about the . . . sort of apparent physi-
cal differences between him and the other children and the other teach-
ers there. And I think that’s because he went there at 18 months. He’s
been exposed from that age on a daily basis to children who look quite
different and teachers who look quite different. . . . um... and have
very different names and different cultural outlooks and you know dif-
ferent diets and all those sorts of things. And he passes absolutely no
comment on it at all.
(Interview 11, emphasis Stephanie’s)

It is difficult to know what to make of this statement. It seems possible
that Stephanie assumed that, although it is a good thing for her son to have
‘exposure’ to difference, he would also maintain his own sense of whiteness.
Rather than emphasising sameness – suggesting that he will grow up think-
ing that other names or ‘outlooks’ are as normal as his – the emphasis on
difference remained. While he was used to being surrounded by ‘different’
people with various names, diets, ways of dressing, there is a suggestion that