Page 97 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

90 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’
As Madeleine’s account shows vividly, this image of blackness did inform
an image of whiteness. Blackness was frightening and something to run away
from, even to the extent of uprooting herself and her daughter. Yet whiteness
was also something to be avoided for its ‘dullness’, ‘stiffness’, for being ‘old
and white and middle class’ and representing the establishment.
In other interviews as well, another side to the threatening image of
blackness, and black men in particular, was presented – that of exciting,
vibrant, exotic and masculinised blackness, which may potentially provide
an escape from the dullness of whiteness. The sexualisation of blackness also
has a long history and was first discussed by Franz Fanon (1967). R.C. Young
describes colonialism as the ‘desiring machine’ and traces how racial theories
have always had at their heart anxieties and theories about sex and inter-
racial sex in particular (Young 1995). Researching identity in contemporary
Britain, Les Back has described how young white people aspire to ‘blackness’
and adopt black dress style and language. He has traced the importance of
sexuality in these cultural translations and how black men are constructed in
terms of fear and desire. He writes that ‘for white young men, the imagining
of black masculinity in heterosexual codes of “hardness” and “hypersexual-
ity” is one of the core elements which attract them to black masculine style’
(Back 1994: 178).
While Back is referring to working-class young people, and particularly
young white men, some of the middle-class women that I interviewed had
similarly eroticised views of black men. Emma was someone who had ro-
manticised views of whiteness and particularly Englishness (examined in
depth in Chapter 7). At times, she also used a discourse that saw whiteness
as dull and moribund (for discussions of whiteness and death, see both hooks
1992 and Dyer 1997). At different points in the interview, Emma described
an area and a school as ‘too white middle class’ and as ‘kind of frigid’. In
contrast, she presented the ‘one black person in her childhood’ (a common
motif – see below) in very sensual terms:

Well there were no black people where I grew up, except for one who
was married to a white woman. And he was gorgeous and everybody
fancied him. So he was always considered to be ‘ah look there, let’s go to
his dance class!’ and all that kind of stuff. And my mother would always
say, (going back to my mother), ‘oh they have such wonderful rhythm’
um, and she was being really kind and generous. Because now when I
think about it, it’s probably, ’cos they probably do have good rhythm,
but it’s quite labelling really.
(Emma, Interview 16)
These two discourses, of whiteness as being ‘frigid’ and black men being
sexually attractive, are of course complementary and mutually reinforcing.
Emma was trying to question her mother’s approach to ‘race’, this was part