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George Lipsitz - Possessive Investment In Whiteness

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Attacking the common view that whiteness is a meaningless category of identity, Lipsitz shows that public policy and private prejudice insure that whites wind up on top of the social hierarchy. Passionately and clearly written, this wide-ranging book probes into the social and material rewards that accrue to the possessive investment in whiteness. Lipsitz sums up the ways that public policy has virtually excluded communities of colour from everything that American society defines as desirable: first-rate education, decent housing, asset accumulation, political power, social status, satisfying work, and even the power to shape and narrate their own history. White supremacy is no thing of the past, no fringe movement. It is a pervasive and pernicious system that restricts the political and cultural agency of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinos every day. Unearned and unacknowledged, race-based advantages, not greater merit or a superior work ethic, account for white privilege. Lipsitzs ultimate point is not to condemn all white people as racists but to challenge everyone to begin a principled examination of personal actions and political commitments. Exposing the system of unfairness is not enough. People of all groups - but especially white people because they benefit from that system - have to work toward eradicating the rewards of whiteness. George Lipsitz is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC, San Diego, and the author of A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Temple), Rainbow At Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, Dangerous Crossroads, and Time Passages.

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title The Possessive Investment in Whiteness How White People Profit - photo 1

title:The Possessive Investment in Whiteness : How White People Profit From Identity Politics
author:Lipsitz, George.
publisher:Temple University Press
isbn10 | asin:1566396352
print isbn13:9781566396356
ebook isbn13:9780585371443
language:English
subjectRacism--United States, Prejudices--United States, Whites--United States--Race identity, United States--Race relations, United States--Social policy--1993-
publication date:1998
lcc:E184.A1L56 1998eb
ddc:305.8/00973
subject:Racism--United States, Prejudices--United States, Whites--United States--Race identity, United States--Race relations, United States--Social policy--1993-
Page iii
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
How White People Profit From Identity Politics
George Lipsitz
Page iv Temple University Press Philadelphia 19122 Copyright 1998 by - photo 2
Page iv
Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122
Copyright 1998 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Published 1998
Printed in the United States of America
Picture 3 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984
Text design by Kate Nichols
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lipsitz, George
The possessive investment in whiteness :how white people profit
from identity politics / George Lipsitz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56639-634-4 (hbk.: alk. paper).-ISBN 1-56639-635-2
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. RacismUnited States. 2. PrejudicesUnited States.
3. WhitesUnited StatesRace identity. 4. United StatesRace
relations. 5. United StatesSocial policy1993-I. Title.
E184.A1L56 1998
305.8'00973dc21 97-53204
Page v
Contents
Introduction: Bill Moore's Body
vii
1. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
1
2. Law and Order: Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege
24
3. Immigrant Labor and Identity Politics
47
4. Whiteness and War
69
5. White Fear: O.J. Simpson and the Greatest Story Ever Sold
99
6. White Desire: Remembering Robert Johnson
118
7. Lean On Me: Beyond Identity Politics
139
8. "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac": Antiblack Racism and White Identity
158

Page vi
9. "Frantic to Join... the Japanese Army": Beyond the Black-White Binary
184
10. California: The Mississippi of the 1990s
211
Notes
255
Acknowledgements
259
Index
261

Page vii
Introduction:
Bill Moore's Body
Picture 4
I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason.
James Baldwin
This book argues that both public policy and private prejudice have created a "possessive investment in whiteness" that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. I use the term "possessive investment" both literally and figuratively. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educations allocated to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the relatives and friends of those who have profited most from present and past racial discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. I argue that white Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity. This whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity.
The term "investment" denotes time spent on a given end, and this book also attempts to explore how social and cultural forces encourage white people
Page viii
to expend time and energy on the creation and re-creation of whiteness. Despite intense and frequent disavowal that whiteness means anything at all to those so designated, recent surveys have shown repeatedly that nearly every social choice that white people make about where they live, what schools their children attend, what careers they pursue, and what policies they endorse is shaped by considerations involving race.1 I use the adjective "possessive" to stress the relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation in our society, to connect attitudes to interests, to demonstrate that white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility. Whiteness is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others. While one can possess one's investments, one can also be possessed by them. I contend that the artificial construction of whiteness almost always comes to possess white people themselves unless they develop antiracist identities, unless they disinvest and divest themselves of their investment in white supremacy.
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