Page 98 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 91
of a process of questioning her parents’ outlook on many issues (‘I get on
very well with them [her parents] and we’re very close, but I do feel different
from them now. I do feel, I don’t know. I mean it’s partly age, obviously,
but I just feel, I have kind of shifted a bit to what I’m most happy with’).
Despite this questioning of her mother’s position, Emma could not deny the
seeming truth that ‘they’ have ‘good rhythm’. She also went on to explain
the differences between an African Caribbean friend from college and the
white middle-class background that she came from. Despite the fact that she
attributed these differences more to class than to ‘race’, they still managed to
fall into a racialised rubric and one that accords with sensual blackness:
Because I think there’s something about middle-class people who expect
people of about 20 going on 25, I think from my experience they expect
them to be very go-getty and ‘oh I’m going to go off around the world
for a year, and then I’m going to go to college and then I’m going to’ you
know that kind of thing and to be very kind of go-getty and wanting to
make a fortune. Whereas, my friend. I mean, he was incredibly laid back
actually. He was much more laid back than practically anyone I’d ever
met. And that was a cultural thing I think.
(Interview 16)

At a later point in the interview, Emma declared (without prompting)
that: ‘if Lucy [her daughter] married someone who was black it wouldn’t
bother me at all. I wouldn’t even think twice about it, it’s who that person
is’. This was a statement made (similarly unprompted) by other interviewees
and suggests a particular anxiety around blackness, whiteness and sexuality.
As Young has emphasised, racial theories are critically about the possibilities
of inter-racial sex:

Racial theory, which ostensibly seeks to keep races forever apart, trans-
mutes into expressions of the clandestine, furtive forms of what can be
called ‘colonial desire’: a covert but insistent obsession with transgres-
sive, inter-racial sex, hybridity and miscegenation.
(Young 1995: xii)

One’s reaction to the idea of one’s son or daughter marrying a black
person has become a popularised ‘test’ of anti-racist sentiment, as repre-
sented in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Mixed-race relationships
are far from uncommon in Britain, and the interviewees were asserting that
they were comfortable with the idea. Nonetheless, the fact that they feel the
need to say this indicated ambivalence around the issue. Emma said that she
wouldn’t ‘think twice’ about the ‘race’ of the person her daughter married
but would only consider who he is – in effect that she would look at him and
block out, or look beyond, his colour.