Page 93 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

86 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
complicit in the silence around the subject. I will now go on to consider
what the interviewees saw when they did allow themselves to think of, and
talk about, ‘race’.

Blackness in the white imaginary
The interviewees often appeared to adopt and approve of a ‘colour-blind’
approach to ‘race’ and racialised difference. However, this did not mean
that it was their only way of seeing, or not seeing. Through the course of the
interviews, various representations of blackness emerged, which suggested
the enduring power of certain images and meanings of blackness in the white
imaginary. Toni Morrison has argued that, for white American writers:

Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that
construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the
not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin colour, the
projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagina-
tion.
(Morrison 1992: 38)

Through exploring the way blackness features in the white imaginary, it
is also possible to begin to gain a picture of whiteness and white subjectivity.
In this section, I suggest that the black other or blackness plays a role in the
white imaginary of delineating the field of intelligibility. In this formula-
tion, blackness can represent the constitutive outside and thereby draw the
boundaries to, and content of, whiteness. This outside is both desired, in the
search for fullness, but also feared for its unstable boundary-marking role. 7

Big black man
A recurring image alluded to in several accounts was that of ‘the black man’.
This was a stereotyped and racialised image where the blackness suggested
was male and both threatening and attractive (not necessarily to the same
people). It is not difficult to see how these images drew on representations
of black men that have been both historically enduring but also adapted to
particular political and discursive moments. Vron Ware (Ware 1992) and
Catherine Hall (Hall 1992) both discuss colonial constructions of black men
and the need to protect white women, for example in the Morant Bay upris-
ing in Jamaica and the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857. The idea that white women
need protection also features in New Right and neo-racist ideologies, as well
as recurring in popular discourse, for instance in recent discussions around
immigration and asylum seekers. In the interviews, I did not ask directly what
the white interviewees thought of black people or whether they thought that
they themselves were racist. However, I would argue that taking part in
the interview and my questions prompted these questions internally for the