Like many of my friends I didn't really realise that I was working class
until I went to university. Suddenly, what I thought as normal became
subtly and not so subtly differentiated as I came into close contact
with the middle classes. I had not known a time, though, when I hadn't
been white, but I didn't really realise that I was white until I read
David Roediger's (1991) book 'The Wages of Whiteness'. Through reading
this work and others on the topic of whiteness the sense of my own
whiteness became palpable to me. Namely, that what I naively thought to
be a timeless property of my skin was a social construction that had
acquired so much symbolic weight over time that it had become seemingly
real: a racial formation and project. This was with consequences, in
that a good part of my actual and psychological labour market and other
employment benefits were not part of a meritocratic system, but due to
the oppression of people of colour. This might be part of a system that
I at the time associated only with the far-right, a system of white
supremacy. Fundamentally, my skin was property and the gains that I had
made through it were at the expense of others. I was a 'so called white'
(Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996) who everyday made a political decision to
not commit 'treason' to whiteness.