Page 95 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

88 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
meant, you know, I suppose if you magnify it up you know it is so easy
if somebody says who lives in a predominantly white area and they see
a black guy break into someone’s car, then they would be very keen to
identify that black guy, you know, it becomes a very easy way, and I felt
that if I bumped into somebody there would have been no question that
it would have been me.
(Interview 15)

While these examples appear to come directly from an imagined image,
unmediated by direct experience, Emily produced a more complex example
in which her experience has confirmed racialised representations. Emily was
unusual in that she admitted that ‘in one sense’ she was ‘racist’. Her racial-
ised and negative response to ‘black youths’ on the streets was justified by
referring to her own negative experiences – rather than simply being the
product of prejudice.

Well, I think racism is very bad round here. In one sense I’m racist in
the fact that if I saw five black youths together on the street, I would not
walk through them. Purely because I’ve been mugged once by a black
chap, I’ve had three black men trying to get in my car on different oc-
casions – it’s always been a black person, be it by just chance but again,
it’s my experience. So, I would be concerned. I mean, if I saw five white
youths, I probably wouldn’t walk through them. Put it like that. But as
a personal thing, a black chap tried to knock my front door down. I can
only say what’s happened to me. Yeah, so I was wary. [. . .] we’ve seen
black people do it, and so I do get worried. Which is a horrible thing to
have to say. Like I said, my best friend at school was black, and she was
wonderful, and her family were lovely people. Actually, she ended up
marrying a white man.
(Interview 21)

Emily was able to recount the incidents that have led her to be so suspi-
cious of black men. Yet at the same time, her language reflected the racialised
treatment of crime and black men in the media. The imagined group were
not young people or boys (for they surely were male) but instead ‘youths’ on
‘the street’. Emily’s experience was mediated through particular discourses.
She was unable to respond to the events without seeing them as evidence of
racialised difference and antagonism. She was perhaps aware at some level
that her use of language may be interpreted problematically as, in contrast
to the ‘youths’, she referred to being mugged by a ‘black chap’ – a charac-
terisation that rings slightly oddly. She also opposed ‘black youths’ to ‘white
youths’. Emily suggested that she would have the same response to white
‘youths’, but even she was unconvinced as she returned to the question of
black male aggressors. Perhaps she was even unsure that white young men
hang around in the same way as they do not register in the same way on her
racialised visual schema.