Page 91 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

84 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
BB: And so, does, I guess particularly with Kevin, do issues of race
or class come up with him?
Beverley: Of what, sorry?
BB: Does he ask about or talk about people being different race or?
Beverley: No, not really. The thing is he’s been brought up with it, with
where we used to live and the same here. No, he sort of, he fits
in quite well really. He’s not really got a preference, he sort of
like wouldn’t put one or the other down. He’s quite good like
that really. He’s quite like me, you know, if you get on with
someone then you get on type of thing really. No he never men-
tions anything like black people, or Asians or anything.
(Interview 42)

Here ‘race’ is presented only as a problem. Talking about ‘race’ immedi-
ately becomes a question of being racist, of ‘putting’ someone ‘down’. The
risk is that Beverley’s son may not always be ‘good’ about ‘race’. Indeed,
Beverley went on to talk about her husband, her son’s stepfather who she
described as ‘patriotic’ (for example, he would not leave Britain even on a
holiday) and presumably not so ‘good’. This also explains the significance
of Beverley’s description of her son as ‘he’s quite like me’. The solution to
the problem is to ignore the issue as much as possible. Her son being ‘good’
about race was attributed to having ‘been brought up with it’ as a result of
living in particular areas of London. Here again is another version of the
‘exposure’ discourse, with ‘it’ presumably being ‘racially different others’.
Nonetheless, at the same time, there was the idea that it was good for her
son to ‘fit in’ with this difference.
Others had more complicated approaches and recognised that there had
been a shift in discourses around ‘race’ in their lifetimes. Madeleine, for ex-
ample, explained to me how she felt caught between her mother’s approach
to ‘race’ and her daughters’ and she herself was unsure of the right position
to take:

So, but you know, my mum was always, she talked to me about race so
it was always: ‘we will be terribly nice when we meet people of different
colours’ [laugh]. Whereas Yasmin has just grown up with people of all
different colours. So she goes: ‘they’re brown and black and white’ and
you know and she’ll go ‘ohh I don’t like that black person’ and I’ll be like
‘ohhh [mock horror] God you can’t say that’, you know, ‘oh you can’t do
that at all’ and it’s not um I don’t know, I think it’s just so different for
her. It’s so much part of her life that she maybe doesn’t have the same
hang-ups about it as I do. And she is aware, now, that ...I don’t know
I think when kids are little they point and say: ‘that person is different
from me’ and you kind of teach them over time that because somebody
looks different from you or because someone’s in a wheelchair that you
have to kind of not see that. You have to educate yourself not to see