Page 89 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

82 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
he will understand that these names and ‘cultural outlooks’ are different
from his, something other than the norm. He is to learn his own whiteness
and normality while recognising those who are not the same, who are differ-
ent and not necessarily to be copied. If this is what Stephanie intended, this
requires quite a complex operation.
When differences are seen and talked about by children, this raises the
question for mothers of how they should be spoken about. Deborah ex-
pressed some anxiety on how to respond to her nearly 4-year old son’s men-
tioning people’s colour. This, in the two examples she gave, was because
he coupled a negative response to a particular person with a reference to
his skin colour (‘I don’t like that black face’). She did not say whether her
son ever made reference to anyone’s ‘white face’. Deborah had discussed
these incidents with her husband, and he helped to reassure her that the
statements were innocent. The anxiety appears to revolve around what is
‘acceptable’. In the interview, Deborah also reassured herself (albeit still a
little unconvinced) that her son ‘goes to a nursery where there are kids from
all sorts of different backgrounds, so I really don’t know. But, I’ve just got to
make sure that I don’t get too sensitive about it, I think’. Deborah also felt
the issue of how to label her son’s own skin colour required some delicacy:

For example, he said, maybe younger than three, ‘what colour am I?’.
And I’d say, well, you’re um sort of – and I did it on purpose just in case
there was sort of anything about race involved in it – um, I don’t say oh
you’re white. I said, oh, you’re a lovely sort of pinkie colour, you know,
and you’ve got your nails which are a sort of a whitey colour, and you
know, this kind of thing. And later on, he started saying what colour’s,
um, baby Roy, a little baby he knows, and what colour’s so and so, and
what colour’s so and so, and I just . . . he doesn’t do it very often, it
would just happen every so often. And I’d say, oh they’re brown, you
know, um, but he would do the same thing about his toys.
(Interview 17)

This is a clear attempt to ensure that the perceptual practices of the child
are directed in a non-racialised way. It shows a good understanding that
‘race’ is an ideology or perceptual practice, rather than merely a description.
So skin was not white, but ‘a lovely sort of pinkie colour’, while nails were
‘sort of a whitey colour’. However, this seems a relatively contorted ap-
proach, whereas the skin of others was simply ‘brown’. Some of the problem
here lies in the ambiguous status of white as a colour (see Dyer 1997) and
inaccuracy as a description of skin tone. It is also connected to the idea of
white as a ‘pure’ colour. While ‘pinkie’ skin is not white, brown can encom-
pass a multitude of tones.
Karon was another interviewee who told an anecdote about her daugh-
ter’s questioning of her own and other children’s colour: