Page 90 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 83
There was a video that I was watching, an exercise video, and she [3-
year old daughter] said ‘look Mummy, there’s a black man in it’ and
that’s the first time she’s ever said anything like that. But Joe [4-year-old
son] obviously, it was quite a few months ago now, he said ‘Mummy
I’m white’ and I said ‘oh yes you are’. He said Kwesi, who was a friend
of his who’s now gone up to the big school, ‘is black’. And they were
doing a topic at nursery where they had to do self-portraits and they
were sitting down basically drawing themselves as they see themselves,
the teacher was obviously saying what colour you are, and crayons, no
I think they were doing chalk, and they had to sort of use the hand to
rub it there, the paper with the chalk different colours. And one of the,
actually I overheard it, because we were just dropping Joe off. And one
of the teachers was saying to his black friend who was sitting down ‘I’m
black’ and she said ‘but are you black? Look at your hand, what colour
would you say? I’ve got a black chalk here – is that black? And your
hand’s brown’ so sort of trying to get them to see what colour they were,
which I thought was quite good in some respects. But in the end of the
day, whatever their culture is, they’re going to end up saying whatever
their parents are saying, ‘I’m black’ because that’s more acceptable thing
to say now. But no, as far as race, that’s been all he’s come out with, it’s
never been a problem.
(Interview 38)

The story is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Karon was con-
firming her daughter’s descriptors of ‘white’ and ‘black’, yet at the same time
seemed to be approving a teacher’s attempt to destabilise them. Karon finally
laid the blame for their persistence on black parents and ‘politically correct’
notions of what was ‘acceptable’. There was a suggestion that ‘they’ have
taken a stance on the question while Karon, as white, was more neutral and
open-minded. In this extract, the uneasy relationship between a description
of colour and a racial category is revealed and goes to the heart of the fragil-
ity of colour blindness. It also shows how ‘race’ is dependent on discursive
reiteration and the negotiation between different subjects as to what colours
are and which colours matter. There was an ongoing slippage between ‘col-
our’, ‘culture’ and ‘race’. For Karon, ‘race’ was something that was to be
negotiated as a potential problem. This was a discourse shared by some other
interviewees. The problem here is the risk of being, or being seen as, racist
– rather than the risk of experiencing racism, or having to rethink one’s own
positioning. Colour blindness was often the response to fear of being seen
as racist. In this sense, it was a negative move, out of self-protection rather
than a positive statement. There was little space for the possibility of chang-
ing one’s own positioning. The following example is a good example of an
instinctive reluctance to talk about ‘race’ (‘of what, sorry’) coupled with an
approach to the ‘problem’ of ‘race’: