White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

3. Growing Up White: The Social Geography of Race

3 Growing Up White: The Social Geography of Race My family was really very racist. It wasjust a very assumed kind of thing. —Patricia Bowen1 Ever since I was a baby, Black people have been around, the person who taught me to walk was a Black woman, that was a maid for our family . . . pretty much all throughout my childhood, there was a maid around. —Beth Ellison I was so unaware of cultural difference that I probably wouldn't have no­ ticed they were different from me. —Clare Traversa The main things I remember . . . aresome friends. . . . The Vernons were two sisters and they had a little brother too, just like our family, and they were Black. And the Frenchs . . . they were white. —Sandy Alvarez I never looked at it like it was two separate cultures. Ijust kind of looked at it like, our family and our friends, they're Mexicans and Chicanes, and that was just a part of our life. —Louise Glebocki This book begins with childhood, looking in detail at five white women's descriptions of the places in which they grew up and analyzing them in terms of what I will refer to as the "social ge­ ography" of race. Geography refers here to the physical land­ scape—the home, the street, the neighborhood, the school, parts of town visited or driven through rarely or regularly, places vis­ ited on vacation. My interest was in how physical space was di­ vided and who inhabited it, and, for my purposes, "who" referred to racially and ethnically identified beings. The notion of a social geography suggests that the physical landscape is peopled and that it is constituted and perceived by 43 44 GROWING UP WHITE means of social rather than natural processes. I thus asked how the women I interviewed conceptualized and related to the people around them. To what extent, for example, did they have rela­ tionships of closeness or distance, equality or inequality, with people of color? What were they encouraged or taught by ex­ ample to make of the variously "raced" people in their environ­ ments? Racial social geography, in short, refers to the racial and ethnic mapping of environments in physical and social terms and enables also the beginning of an understanding of the conceptual mappings of self and other operating in white women's lives. The five women upon whom I focus in this chapter do not represent the full range of experiences of the thirty women I in­ terviewed, and the landscapes of childhood will in fact be a re­ current theme in this book. Rather than taking these particular narratives as representative in their content, I draw on them here to begin the process of "defamiliarizing" that which is taken for granted in white experience and to elaborate a method for making visible and analyzing the racial structuring of white experience. This method, it seems to me, takes the question of white women and racism well beyond that of the individual and her beliefs or attitudes to something much broader and more grounded in the material world. For it becomes possible to begin examining the ways racism as a system shaped these women's daily environ­ ments, and to begin thinking about the social, political, and his­ torical forces that brought those environments into being. All five of the women in this group were between twenty­five and thirty­six years old at the time of the interviews, their child­ hoods and teenage years spanning the mid­1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. One woman, Beth Ellison, grew up middle class, the other four—Pat Bowen, Clare Traverso, Sandy Alvarez, and Louise Glebocki—in working­class homes. Pat grew up in Maryland, Beth in Alabama and Virginia; Sandy and Louise are from the Los Angeles area, and Clare is from a small town outside San Diego, California. These women's stories all bear the marks of an era of challenges and transformations in terms of race, racism, and antiracism. Sandy's mother, for example, was a political activist involved in struggles for integration. By contrast, as we will see, Beth's mother was ambivalent in the face of challenges to the racial status quo in her all­white, middle­class neighborhood. All five women spent at least part of their childhoods in racially desegregated GROWING UP WHITE 45 schools, indicative of the effects of the civil rights movement on the patterning...