'I Had a Lot of Black Friends Growing up that my Father didn't Know About': An exploration of white poor and working class female racism

Abstract

Here we pull together data drawn from three studies to probe the issue of white poor and working class female racism further than previous research has done. All three investigations are deep ethnographic portraits of men and women, boys and girls, in the urban north-east, spanning middle school through young adulthood. In the first two studies, we present data gathered from men and boys and then suggest the relative absence of racialised discourse among girls and women. In the final study, we show how expressed racism similar to that of white working class men exists among a group of white poor middle school girls in a community centre, and we argue that the existence of this neighbourhood organisation, which serves a predominantly white clientele, actually encourages the formation of racist attitudes while, at the same time, offering a space wherein girls can begin to articulate their concerns about domestic violence in their communities. In this latter section, we probe further the potentially contradictory activities taking place in what Boyte and Evans (1992) call 'free spaces'.