Telling Young Lives: Portraits of Global Youth

13. Darkest Whiteness: Race, Class, and Culture in Global Times: A Portrait of Helena

Anoop Nayak 13 Darkest Whiteness: Race, Class, and Culture in Global Times A Portrait of Helena H elena is a white, seventeen-year-old young woman. She has blue eyes, blonde hair, and for most of her life has lived in Lillehammer, Norway, with her Nordic mother and English father. When I met Helena, she was living away from home in the United Kingdom with just her English grandmother for company. I first got to know Helena when conducting a neighborhood ethnography investigating how the lives of new generations were being recast in the light of deindustrialization and global change. A prominent theme in this work was the question of what it meant to be young, white, and working class. In undertaking research in the North East of England, I was soon implicated in a dense network of social relations that led me to a multisite analysis of young people in various school, leisure, and community facilities. The study included interviews , observations, and interactions with young people in different spaces and was enriched by historical material and my own experience of living in an economically deprived and socially stigmatized neighborhood. I interviewed Helena several times during my visits to the large state school she attended. Compared with the rest of England, the North East region has an ostensibly white population. Economically, it was once famous for coal mining, ship building, and mechanical engineering related to the production of armaments and industrial chemicals. Today, much of this industry has either disappeared or is severely eroded. The main economic activities are now centered on business, leisure, cultural industries, telephone call centers, and the service sector. The North East is, in many Darkest Whiteness 165 respects, part of a “branch plant” economy where much of the profit generated does not stay in the region but tends to flow to multinational corporations whose headquarters lie elsewhere. But despite the dismantling of much heavy industry, there is a strong sense of local identity and laboring history among much of the population. I interacted with Helena many times during her twelve-month stay in the United Kingdom and watched as she navigated a committed, if occasionally naïve, race and class consciousness. Her story is significant in demonstrating the important role that both local and global cultures play in young people’s lives. It also discloses how everyday routines, performances , and acts of embodiment can momentarily reinforce or subvert these inequalities. While her biography cannot be said to be representative , its value lies in revealing the intricate patterning of race and class in youth cultures. Helena shows how these processes can be reconfigured through the living and telling of young lives. Family Biographies A red thread of socialist history and political protest is woven through the rich tapestry of Helena’s familial biography. Her paternal grandfather, now deceased, had fought in World War II and been a long-serving trade union member. He had worked in the shipping industry throughout much of his laboring life. Helena’s grandmother remains a colorful character whom I had seen and spoken with on various occasions before I grew to know Helena. Her grandmother had appeared several times on local news programs and in the press protesting against the acquisition of common land by builders and planners. I had signed many of her grandmother’s petitions in an attempt to preserve one of the few large green spaces for public use that was located near a major shopping area in the region. At the time, I lived near this protected, greenfield site and was similarly opposed to any attempts to sell it off to leisure and corporate business. For Helena, who was shy about publicity, her grandmother was a high-profile, placard-waving embarrassment. And, while the two of them shared a loving relationship, Helena flatly refused to sign up for any of her grandmother’s “silly requests” through the fear that signing would invigorate her campaign and engender further media notoriety. In what became a running family joke, Helena’s grandmother placed her petitions in ever more prominent locations in the home in the hope that her granddaughter would eventually sign one. Suffice to say, she did not. Helena’s father was employed at a local school in Lillehammer, and her mother worked in the Norwegian health-care system. “Me family has always 166 Chapter 13 been working class,” she asserted...