Page 94 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 87
women and shaped what they said to me. When the white women interview-
ees asked themselves ‘what do I think of black people?’ or ‘am I racist?’, the
image of a threatening black man, or ‘gang’ of black men, was the first to
suggest itself in several cases.
Jennifer, who lived in Clapham, gives an example of the readily available
image of black gangs in the white imaginary. Immediately after asserting her
own (partial?) ‘blindness’ to colour and difference, an image occurs to her
that directly contradicts this:

I’ve never been frightened or wary . . . they’ve always been ...I sup-
pose at that age I was probably quite inquisitive to know, but maybe
that was because my parents were quite . . . had made them out as be-
ing people . . . people of different race being no different. Or they are
different, but what’s different about them is, you know, nothing to be
frightened of, or ...I mean, if I see a gang of black kids now I still get
anxious. If I’m out walking. But if I see a gang of anybody, I would still
be anxious. I wouldn’t be any more anxious because they were black.
I would be more anxious because it’s a gang, I think. Um, I don’t know.
(Interview 25)

Jennifer began her consideration of her attitude to people who are differ-
ent with the question of whether she is frightened or wary of black people
(this extract is part of a longer account in which Jennifer provided a history
of her encounters with people who were different from her). This indicates
the place that difference or blackness has in her mind. Also significant is the
way black people were readily homogenised into ‘them’ and ‘they’. Jennifer
appeared unable to say ‘white’ – instead producing an opposition between
a ‘gang of black kids’ and ‘a gang of anybody’. She herself did not seem to
know how to deal with the contradiction of her fear of a ‘gang of black kids’
and her assertion that she was brought up in a way in which people ‘of dif-
ferent race’ were seen as ‘no different’, or at least not frighteningly different.
In another example, Heather also conjured up a law-breaking black man.
This image appeared in the middle of an empathetic account that is intended
to show how, through being on a Kuwaiti Airlines flight where she was the
only white person, Heather realised what it is like to be a visual minority.
While Heather might innocently bump into someone on a crowded plane,
the imagined black person was not a woman but a man, and was committing
a crime:

Just about the fact that you stick out like a sore thumb. Everybody could
see... there was no kind of melting into the background. You know, if I
brushed past somebody and then walked past the other way they would
have said, oh, that was the girl who brushed past me a minute ago, and
they would not have thought, oh, was it her or was it . . .? Because it
was so easy to recognise me out of everybody else. And that suddenly