The Colour of Class

The educational strategies of the Black middle classes

Nicola Rollock, David Gillborn, Carol Vincent, Stephen J. Ball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317583899
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How do race and class intersect to shape the identities and experiences of Black middle-class parents and their children? What are Black middle-class parents' strategies for supporting their children through school? What role do the educational histories of Black middle-class parents play in their decision-making about their children's education?

There is now an extensive body of research on the educational strategies of the white middle classes but a silence exists around the emergence of the Black middle classes and their experiences, priorities, and actions in relation to education. This book focuses on middle-class families of Black Caribbean heritage.

Drawing on rich qualitative data from nearly 80 in-depth interviews with Black Caribbean middle-class parents, the internationally renowned contributors reveal how these parents attempt to navigate their children successfully through the school system, and defend them against low expectations and other manifestations of discrimination. Chapters identify when, how and to what extent parents deploy the financial, cultural and social resources available to them as professional, middle class individuals in support of their children's academic success and emotional well-being. The book sheds light on the complex, and relatively neglected relations, between race, social class and education, and in addition, poses wider questions about the experiences of social mobility, and the intersection of race and class in forming the identity of the parents and their children.

The Colour of Class: The educational strategies of the Black middle classes will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates on education, sociology and social policy courses, as well as academics with an interest in Critical Race Theory and Bourdieu.

The Colour of Class was awarded 2nd prize by the Society for Educational Studies: Book Prize 2016.

1 Race, class status and identification

DOI: 10.4324/9781315741680-2

I have multiple identities: I am middle class by profession, working class by birth and attitude and African Caribbean by culture, history and social experience.

Introduction

While we did not set out to explicitly examine Black identity in our interview questions, our data reveal considerable variation in the ways that parents situate themselves in relation to what it means to be Black and their views on wider notions of Blackness. These articulations permeate the interviews irrespective of the theme under discussion. This chapter begins, therefore, by examining how the Black middle classes think about their identity as Black people before turning to focus on how they position themselves in relation to the label ‘middle class’.

Black identity among the Black middle classes

For most of the respondents, to be Black is to share a set of cultural understandings, memories and experiences which are transmitted through history, food, music, a belief in a Black community or identity and an experience of racism. These themes and processes function as a form of cultural adhesive, enabling moments of affiliation with other Black people. Felicia’s recollection of an encounter while at an exhibition displaying the work of the British Nigerian Turner-prize artist Chris Ofili illustrates this well:

… recently a friend and I went to see a Chris Ofili exhibition and I recall that (…) we really enjoyed it. (…) we were sitting down having a conversation about it, laughing because the White people were walking around looking very serious (…) we were laughing saying that we thought they didn’t understand it and a Black woman was there on her own and she overheard the conversation [we were having] and she joined in because she said she thought the same as well (…) We were just discussing various things; lots of things we were picking out whereas we thought they [White people] were actually passing through quite quickly.

Here we observe how markers of Black identity, symbolised in the cultural imagery deployed in Ofili’s paintings, serve as reflections of identity and experience with which the women can relate. This intimate connection with and interpretation of his work serves in their minds to differentiate their experience from that of White exhibition attendees who are positioned as being at the margins of Black knowledge. The exhibition lacks a deep resonance for White people, hence their ‘passing through quite quickly’. While we might think of this cultural adhesive as connecting Felicia and her companions, it also introduces an invisible boundary marker between them and White attendees. Interestingly, the exhibition was in fact held at Tate Britain – an establishment, like many national art institutions, steeped in tradition, White privilege and historicity. Yet the acceptance of Ofili’s work into this space suggests that his art has successfully navigated some of the very boundaries and cultural norms usually associated with Whiteness. While Felicia and her companions do not comment upon this wider point, the above extract serves to usefully reveal some of the parameters of distinction between Black and White cultural norms.

Robert’s articulation of what it means, for him, to be Black calls upon similar signifiers of cultural understanding and connection:

… although my taste in music is pretty eclectic – it is very heavily dominated by Black music. I like Black humour and so on. I am married to a Black woman; that is very important to me [laughter] (…) in terms of empathy and a common language, shared experience, common frame of reference. Someone who understands what I am talking about instantly. Those things are very important.

We start, therefore, to build a picture of Black identity which extends beyond cultural signifiers. Being married to a Black woman represents, for Robert, a means of immediate commonality and empathetic understanding, concepts that we can begin to think of as fundamental to the notion of what Sivanandan (1993: 66) calls ‘a black perspective’.

Femi, who is of mixed heritage and has a White partner, grew up in a mainly White rural area. She explains that the sense of belonging or connection with other Black people, to which both Felicia and Robert refer, is not an automatic given simply because you are also Black. She speaks of being ‘devastated’ at not having had this bond when she was a young woman, though she is ‘aware’ or conscious ¹ now. Contrast Femi with Miles who regards himself as Black in descriptive terms only. In the extract which follows, he has just been asked about the role of race in shaping significant life decisions:

That is not even in the equation. What for me … for nearly everything that I do … is ‘have I got the best of x? (…) race is not a big one for me at all other than as I said, I like to think that [I’m] a good example of a person, and I’m also a good positive Black example, and probably in that order, but I don’t see any of that as being the mirror of [who I am]. I just think I am who I am and just move on with it. I’ve been in lots and lots of situations where I haven’t even noticed that I’m the only Black person there (…). It’s not something that I think [that] ‘there’s loads of Black people or loads of White people’, it’s just ‘do I like it’? If I go to a football match sometimes I think it’s great, sometimes I think there’s too many people here, but I don’t think about the ethnic mix.

Miles, who is married to a White partner and has three young children, downplays the idea that the colour of his skin has any bearing on his life, reporting that he does not see race either in his personal context or in public spaces. However, there is an uncomfortable paradox to his colour-blindness. In order to assert that he has been in several situations and not ‘noticed that I’m the only Black person there’ he reveals that he does in fact see race but actively goes out of his way to ignore it and to suppress its significance; he denies its relevance to his life. To even see or acknowledge race is problematic. Mary, the mother of two mixed-race children who lives outside of London, conveys a similar sentiment when she is asked about race, stating:

I don’t think about people’s ethnic backgrounds at all.

And later:

I tend to think more on individual [basis]. It sounds awful because I’m Black, but I don’t think of my colour at all, throughout my day I don’t actually think about it.

Here Mary offers a hint, a moment of acknowledgement that perhaps she ought to position differently in terms of her raced identity. ‘It sounds awful, because I’m Black …’ intimates that the way in which she regards herself is somehow different from what she knows to be a more prevalent conceptualisation of Black identity. She recognises that to think in terms of the individual is to be at odds with principles of Blackness. Both Mary’s and Miles’ interviews stand out for their relative lack of detailed analysis and deconstruction of issues around race and racism. They both tend to stress the idea of individuality: identities are individual and achieving success is an individual act. As we shall see in Chapter 6, this – perhaps unsurprisingly – has implications for the way in which they approach discussing issues of racism with their children. We can draw a stark comparison between their perspectives and the way in which Cynthia, the mother of three Black boys under the age of 15 years, situates herself:

Whenever I get up, when I go out the door, when I walk down the street, I walk always in my mind you walk as a Black person. You walk as a Black woman, and I feel that I am an example to young Black girls when I see them on the street. I feel that I have to recognise the senior Black people on the street. The way that I allow my children to see me being treated in a shop scenario as a Black person is very important because I think it is always an education for them.

Here we observe the sense not merely of the collective identity that Femi referred to earlier but also the ways in which this is enacted as an intergenerational and gendered form of responsibility. Cynthia’s Black identity is conscious, lived, present. It is intricately bound up in seeking to shape and inform positively the experiences of those around her; values of respect and recognition are pivotal. There is a discernible difference to emphasise here with regard to her acts of recognition, which involve seeing and being an example to other Black people, and Miles’ commitment to colour-blindness and individualism. We make a distinction therefore between being Black in terms of mere skin pigmentation and being Black as aligned to a political or conscious sense of collective worth and investment (Rollock 2014). Of course, we do not propose that Black identity can be understood merely in these dichotomous terms: being either ‘conscious’ or ‘incidental’ (as we might summarise Miles’ and Mary’s position), but seek in our analysis to constantly attend to the complexities of being Black within a mainly White society (Touré 2011):

Its [cultural identity] complexity exceeds [a] binary structure of representation. At different places, times, in relation to different questions, the boundaries are re-sited. They become, not only what they have, at times, certainly been – mutually excluding categories, but also what they sometimes are – differential points along a sliding scale.

(Hall 1996: 215)

This framework – thinking of identities as a sliding scale and in a state of constant flux – proves useful when we come to think about how the Black middle classes manage relationships in work and social settings.

Friendship groups and work relationships

One way to conceptualise Black identity within the British context is through the ways in which our respondents talk about friendship groups and relations at work. Our data shows that they engage in delicate, largely invisible acts of artful decision-making and compromise as class (see below) and race considerations collide. An extract from our interview with Alice, a mother of three children each at different stages of education, speaks to these tensions:

I have friends who work in clerical positions who would only do certain things. It’s really weird. If you try and get them to do something else they don’t want to because they feel as though if they were to do it they would be out of place (…) they don’t understand why I would want to go to a place that is frequented by White people and they see it as a place that is frequented by White people when it is not (…) if I go to an exhibition or if I go to a gallery for example (…). I am not sure if it is because they think that there are certain things that you can’t do as a Black person or that actually I know what it is, I think it is because they think there are certain things that you shouldn’t do as a Black person but if you were to do these certain things it makes you very ‘unblack’ to do them.

This account is interesting for several reasons. First, although Alice’s observations are about her Black working-class friends, she initially highlights their class status (clerical positions) and not their race when commenting on their discomfort when attending mainly White spaces. So we are introduced to the idea that (her) middle-class status may enable the development of an identity – forms of Black cultural capital – that allow her to feel more comfortable (or be more accepted) than her friends in predominantly White spaces. And certainly, given their occupations, it is likely that respondents in our study are used to being one of few people of colour in the workplace and to calculating how best to navigate an existence within that context. Our second point of observation is that Alice’s criticism is directed at her friends. She suspects that the White spaces she mentions – galleries, exhibitions – epitomise pastimes not traditionally pursued by Blacks and therefore remain unattractive to them.

Versions of an alleged Black authenticity come into play here. It presupposes that there are certain acts with which those who are ‘consciously’ Black do not engage since to do so is to challenge or interrupt this Blackness. However, we argue that any meaningful critique of Black authenticity must take account of the broader sociopolitical sphere. Questions of Black authenticity, we suggest, only come into play within a wider context of Whiteness. Engaging in White spaces or activities traditionally associated with White people is to risk being subjected to racism or to values and perspectives perceived to be at odds with Blackness (see below). Black authenticity may be understood, therefore, as a consequence of a historic imperative for self-preservation and protection. It is a way of marking oneself off from the dangers of Whiteness, of retaining some (invisible) boundary between Them and Us. The parameters of Black authenticity are constantly being remade as racism becomes more covert and complex and as Black people develop increasingly sophisticated tools and resources to navigate mainly White spaces. It is crucial to note that such arguments do not hold with the same resonance for those who might be positioned as ‘incidentally’ Black since they have less profound investment in a collective Black identity and hence scant, if any, commitment to explicitly addressing the broader issues that affect Black people. Indeed, as we have already noted, those who are positioned in this way tend to deny seeing racial difference at all.

We have already spoken of the ways in which some respondents considered that the boundaries between Black and White people might be understood via the latter’s lack of understanding of Black cultural symbols. In the following extract, we look more closely at how these boundaries become reinforced due to stereotypical representations of Black people within wider society:

Clearly all the friends that I have are not going to be Jamaican [like me]. My Black friends are from Ghana, Nigeria, from wherever, so there are certain sensibilities that have to be negotiated there but the one thing that you don’t actually have to explain to someone is being Black. You don’t have to talk about it. I mean you might moan about things that happen but you don’t have to explain. I have my closest [White] friends whom I have known since I was 11 who would do anything for me but still to this day talk about Black people and their ghetto blasters and I say, ‘Well what are you talking about? Do I have a ghetto blaster?’ And you know you can constantly be surprised by this.

(Lorraine)

Here we see how a certain collective Black identity exists – shaped, partly, in response to the vagaries and turmoil of racism – which can transcend differences of ethnicity. There is no need to account for one’s Blackness when with other Black people. Note, in comparison to this, the ways in which race operates when in the company of White people. Despite the longevity of their friendship, race signals an omnipresent discomfort for Lorraine’s White friends. Black people are viewed through a narrow, restrictive lens which refuses to make multiple versions of Blackness possible. Being with other Black people therefore represents a certain safety from such limitations (Rollock 2012b), thus serving to reinforce an invisible cohesion among them. Felicia echoes Lorraine’s point:

… I recall talking to one in particular [East Asian] woman about it and she said to me, ‘I just don’t feel comfortable with them [White colleagues] at all. They don’t make me feel comfortable’. Whereas I socialise sometimes but I am aware that when I am socialising it is sort of like I am doing it on the basis that I don’t see why I should exclude myself and so I might not enjoy this but you need to learn to interact with me whether you like it or not (…) Someone, one of the most senior of the … runs the whole [organisation] saw me the other day and said hello to me thinking I was another Black woman and when she said the name I said, ‘I am not so and so’, and she...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Key to transcripts
• List of parent occupations
• Introduction: background and context
• 1 Race, class status and identification
• Part I The Black middle classes and school
• Part II The Black middle classes and society
• Conclusion: a colour-blind future?
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index