Imagining the ‘Other’/Figuring Encounter: White English Middle-Class and Working-Class Identifications

Although there is a vast corpus on ‘race’ in the British context, a relatively small proportion of this is devoted to the ethnic majority, i.e. white Britons. While there is no direct parallel with the investigation of white identities that has occurred in the USA with the multidisciplinary field of ‘whiteness studies’ (Garner, 2007), this chapter provides a contribution to the analysis of how people discursively make ‘white’ identities in contemporary Britain, in both working and middle-class milieux in places where there are fewer BME people than average.