White Lives: The Interplay of Race, Class and Gender in Everyday Life

208 Pages·2006·0.93 MB·English

by  Bridget Byrne

White Lives
How are we to understand race at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
How do concepts of ‘race’ intersect with gender and class?
White Lives reconsiders white identities through white experiences of
race. Exploring race, alongside class and gender, Bridget Byrne analyses
the flexibility of racialised discourse in everyday life, while simultaneously
arguing for a radical deconstruction of the notions of race these discourses
create.
Byrne focuses on the experience of white mothers and their young chil-
dren, as a key site in the reproduction of class, race and gender subjectivi-
ties. Through this, she offers a unique perspective on both the experience
of motherhood and ideas of white identity. Her analysis is multilayered,
looking at local and private spaces but also considering national and public
debates concerning race.
This accessible and revealing book will appeal across disciplines to stu-
dents studying sociology, anthropology, geography, race and ethnicity and
cultural studies.
Bridget Byrne is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.
For Sara and Khalid
White Lives
The interplay of ‘race’, class and gender
in everyday life
Bridget Byrne
First published 2006
by Routledge
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© 2006 Bridget Byrne
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN10: 0–415–34711–4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–34712–2 (pbk)
ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–34711–2 (hbk)
ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–34712–9 (hbk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Knowing ‘whiteness’ 1
2 Troubling ‘race’ 15
3 Talk, tea and tape recorders 28
4 Narrating the self 42
5 Seeing, talking, living ‘race’ 72
6 In search of a ‘good mix’: ‘race’, class and gender and
practices of mothering 104
7 How English am I? 138
8 Conclusion 168
Notes 176
Bibliography 181
Appendix 1 191
Appendix 2 194
Index 196
Acknowledgements
This book has been some time coming and there are many people who
have read parts or even most of it. In particular, I would like to thank An-
nie Whitehead who encouraged me from the start. Thanks also to Niamh
Moore and Khalid Nadvi who have been reading and commenting on the
research almost from the beginning to the very end. Thanks also to Les Back,
Jane Cowan, Suki Ali, Bev Skeggs, Fiona Ross, Eva Mackey, Justin Byrne,
members of the Feminist Theory Reading Group at Sussex (in particular
Charlotte Adcock, Jude Redaway, Cate Eschle, Jo Littler, Andrea Hammel,
Niamh Moore and Paramjit Rai) and participants at various conferences who
have commented on parts of the work. I would also like to thank colleagues
at Manchester, in particular Laura Doan, Tej Purewal, Virinder Kalra, Nick
Thoburn, Paul Keleman, Sheila Rowbotham, Helen Woods and Darren Wal-
dron.
Thanks also to the Byrne and Nadvi extended families and to my friends
both inside and outside academia.
I would like to thank all those who gave up their time and were prepared
to open some of their lives to me through the interviews. Pursuing inter-
viewees can be a tiring and stressful process, but it was always heartening
to receive so much generosity. Not only did many women welcome me into
their homes and were prepared to be interviewed and taped, but they also
went to some lengths to introduce me to their friends. I hope I have given
their accounts the respect they deserve.
This book is based on research funded by the ESRC.
1 Knowing ‘whiteness’
One of the difficulties of being an academic researcher is knowing how much
detail to go into when people ask you about your work. This book is based
on research on a subject which, for many of the people I chatted to, had very
little concrete meaning: that of white experience and identities. This was
particularly true for white people who had no reason to think that their own
experience or identities were racialised in any way. In these casual conversa-
tions, I found that a common response to the idea of studying ‘whiteness’
was to suggest that the really interesting whiteness was somehow ‘out there’,
somewhere else, preferably far away. So it was often suggested that I should
study whiteness in South Africa, in Zimbabwe or in the development aid do-
nor community. All of these would indeed be very interesting and important
contexts for understanding how ‘race’1 structures identity and interaction.
Nonetheless, this book is focused on a context which, for many of those
making these suggestions, was not ‘out there’ but very much at home and
perhaps too close for comfort – that of middle- and working-class white
mothers of young children living in south London.
These conversations can tell us something about whiteness and white
identity. There is often a tendency when thinking about whiteness (and
perhaps most other social phenomena) to look to the extreme and to that
which is seen as ‘different’. Thus, many people can recognise the interest
in understanding whiteness in a situation where white people are in a mi-
nority (therefore different) and/or who exercise extreme power (as in the
recent history of apartheid) or hold extreme views (far-right groups were
also popular suggestions). But the ‘normalness’ of whiteness in Britain does
not hold so much interest. The assumption often is that ‘we’ (everyday white
people in Britain who are not politically racist) cannot be interesting as ‘race’
has nothing to do with us.
This book sets out to examine the racialised experience of a particular
group of white women, living in a specific location and at one moment of
their lives. It takes a group of white people who have not been selected as
extreme examples – people who would consider themselves as ‘normal’ or
‘average’ people – but still asks how they are raced. That is, how are their
2 Knowing ‘whiteness’
experiences, sense of selves, ways of thinking, speaking and doing shaped
by ideas of race and racist structures and relations. Thus, it requires hearing
and seeing ‘race’ in contexts where it is not explicitly felt as present. When
one white woman (interviewee) talks to another white women (interviewer)
about schooling or national identity or living in London, the ways in which
they are ‘doing’ ‘race’, just as they are doing class, sexuality and gender,
will not necessarily be referred to or even understood. But this book tries to
trace some of the ways in which this talk is shaped by racist processes that
produce raced bodies, imaginaries and ways of being and relating to others.
Those who have been positioned as non-white are more likely to have their
lives scrutinised for the effects of ‘race’, but this book asserts the importance
of applying similar attention to the lives and identities of those who are
positioned as white. As Ruth Frankenberg argues:
To speak of whiteness is, I think, to assign everyone a place in the rela-
tions of racism. It is to emphasize that dealing with racism is not merely
an option for white people – that, rather, racism shapes white people’s
lives and identities in a way that is inseparable from other facets of daily
life.
(Frankenberg 1993: 6)
However, it is also important to heed Sara Ahmed’s warning that merely
marking whiteness (which is itself an act that is only new to white people)
does not achieve anti-racist aims: ‘putting whiteness into speech, as an object
to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and it
does not necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action
that we could describe as anti-racist’ (Ahmed 2004: 12). Rather than making
claims for moving ‘beyond race’ or for successful anti-racism, Ahmed argues
that work on whiteness should ‘be about attending to forms of white racism
and white privilege that are not undone, and may even be repeated and
intensified, through declarations of whiteness, or through the recognition of
privilege as privilege’ (Ahmed 2004: 58).
Nonetheless, I argue that to mark what is frequently (at least to white
eyes) unmarked – the racialised nature of white experience – is part of a
process of decentring whiteness. It is a crucial counter to racism, or at least
a condition for better understanding its workings. The intention is not to
reify – or essentialise – something called whiteness, but to show how the
practices, subject construction and identities of people positioned as ‘white’
are racialised. An important way to avoid essentialising whiteness is to ac-
knowledge that it is not a singular experience and to examine the different
ways in which whiteness or ‘white’ people are produced. In particular, I am
interested in exploring how class and gender intersect with whiteness and
how identities are produced in specific times and places.
To examine whiteness requires going beyond questions of white con-
sciousness or as Helen (charles) (1993: 99) puts it, whether white people
Knowing ‘whiteness’ 3
know that they are white. White people’s conscious appreciation of their
‘whiteness’ may well be limited. They may only feel, or be conscious of
being, white in the presence of racialised others (and perhaps even then
only when they feel that they are in a minority). But I will argue that white-
ness is more than a conscious identity, it is also a position within racialised
discourses as well as a set of practices and imaginaries. As such, it plays a
part in constructing the identities that white people do express. It may un-
derpin notions of being a ‘woman’ or a ‘Londoner’ or ‘British’. Thus, I want
to show how white people are positioned within processes of racialisation,
even when they may not explicitly articulate their ‘whiteness’. This further
implies the need for a model of identity that goes beyond ‘identity politics’
and addresses processes of identification, as will be explored in Chapter 2. I
will suggest that ‘race’ needs to be understood as the product of a range of
discourses and practices, which construct how people see, understand and
live difference as racialised. ‘White’, ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ subjects are produced
through the operation of racialised discourses and practices. But these proc-
esses of racialised subject construction do not occur independently of gender
and class. Rather, ‘race’, class and gender intersect in complex and chang-
ing ways to produce different subjects and subjectivities. These intersections
which produce subjects are also located within specific contexts – time and
place matter. The ways in which whiteness works will be different in Britain
and South Africa. It will also be different in Hackney and Hampstead, or
New York and Nebraska.
Accordingly, this book sets out to examine not just white experience, but
particular gendered and classed articulations of white experience. The book
is based on material gathered from interviews with white women who were
living in south London (predominantly Clapham and Camberwell) and who
were bringing up young children. I set out to consider a series of questions
through the interviews: how do class, ‘race’ and gender construct the lived
experience of white women living in London?; how do they talk about and
imagine racialised differences?; how are their practices as mothers racialised,
classed and gendered?; do they encounter particular issues around ‘race’,
class and gender with their children?; how are they bringing up children who
are also raced, classed and gendered subjects?; do they live and move around
geographies in London and in England which they see as raced, classed or
gendered?; if they account for their lives, producing a narrative of their self,
how are these racialised, classed and gendered?; do they have a sense of a
collective, national identity?; do they feel English or British?; and how are
these identities raced, classed and gendered?
The interviews that resulted provide rich material for examining the in-
terplay of ‘race’, class and gender both in the constructions of the women’s
sense of self and in their everyday lives. By examining the interviews with
mothers living in specific areas of London, I am able to explore in depth
how subjectivities and experience are constructed by ‘raced’, classed and
gendered discourses and how they are produced in particular contexts. The