White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

2. White on White: The Interviewees and the Method

2 White on White: The Interviewees and the Method Conducting the interviews for this book was, in different ways, terrifying, frustrating, challenging, and joyous (not necessarily in that order, either temporally or quantitatively!). The terror came in large part from the fact that interviewing required of me a con­ frontation with my own personality and cultural training. For in­ terviewing requires one to go out and ask personal questions of strangers and, even before that, to approach unknown people, either in person or by telephone, and ask them for an enormous favor—to give time, and to share personal history, for the most part taking entirely on trust that their time and, more impor­ tantly, their words will be treated with respect. The frustration and the challenge came from the special difficulties involved in interviewing white women on what for many of them was, in ways I will explore later, a "taboo" topic that generated areas of memory lapse, silence, shame, and evasion. The joy came from listening, talking, and reveling in the singularity of the women's stories, accents, turns of phrase. It would be patently untrue to suggest that I "agreed" or identified equally with each woman's perspective on society, or with how each articulated the issues of race, culture, and whiteness with which I was preoccupied. None­ theless, in the context of the interviews themselves, I worked to comprehend the logic of their lives and the words with which they described them. Vital Statistics Between 1984 and 1986, I interviewed thirty white women, di­ verse in age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation, and political orientation, but all living in California at the time of the interviews either in Santa Cruz County or the San Francisco Bay Area. The interviews were lengthy: I spent between three and eight hours with each woman (usually over two sessions, but, in 23 24 WHITE ON WHITE a few instances, one or three), striving to set race in the context of her life and priorities rather than separate it from other concerns. It is crucial at the outset to begin to give an indication of who these women were, although of course that will become clearer throughout the book. It is difficult for several reasons to catego­ rize definitively or in any standardized fashion the class or eco­ nomic backgrounds of these women as a group. For one thing, given differences of generation, region, and urban or rural up­ bringing, the class categories with which the women identified themselves, and even the women's concrete descriptions of their own or their parents' means of survival, meant different things in different contexts. Making matters more complicated were the degrees to which many families' economic fates seesawed in re­ sponse either to national trends (the Depression, World War II) or family crises (chiefly the disability, death, or departure of the male breadwinner). The women's descriptions of their economic situations in child­ hood were, of necessity, subjective, since children for the most part neither know their parents' income nor can calibrate it in re­ lation to the class structure as a whole. More than a few (Evelyn Steinman, Ginny Rodd, Dot Humphrey, Louise Glebocki, Clare Traverse)1 described themselves as having been "poor" for all or part of their childhoods. And others, it seemed to me from their descriptions of parents erratically or underemployed, must also have been so. But talking of class was complicated, an emotional and rhetorical as well as an objective process. Thus, for some, the assertion of middle class status was at times a metaphor for race privilege. And Ginny Rodd, having described how to maintain an entire family for months at a time on flour and milk alone, dis­ avowed in a different way the image of her rural smallholding family as "poor" when she said: We were all the same. There were no rich where we lived. Or rather, no rich, no poor. You couldn't get poor as long as you enjoyed your life. You were rich if you loved your family. No rich, no poor. We all worked. The group was by no means confined to one or even a few class strata, but rather ranged from working class to upper middle and owning strata; the children of the middle strata were better rep­ resented than the very rich or the very poor. In the women's WHITE ON WHITE 25...