ABSTRACT
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 conversations, 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 donor 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.
