The Possessive Investment in Whiteness : How White People Profit From Identity Politics

George Lipsitz’s classic book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. 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 educational opportunities available to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the friends and relatives of those who have profited most from past and present discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with structured advantages. In this twentieth anniversary edition, Lipsitz provides a new introduction and updated statistics; as well as analyses of the enduring importance of Hurricane Katrina; the nature of anti-immigrant mobilizations; police assaults on Black women, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray; the legacy of Obama and the emergence of Trump; the Charleston Massacre and other hate crimes; and the ways in which white fear, white fragility, and white failure have become drivers of a new ethno-nationalism. As vital as it was upon its original publication, the twentieth anniversary edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is an unflinching but necessary look at white supremacy. George Lipsitz is a Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His previous books include How Racism Takes Place and A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (both Temple). Lipsitz serves as Chair of the boards of Directors of the African American Policy Forum and of the Woodstock Institute and is senior editor of the comparative and relational ethnic studies journal KALFOU. In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town. Contents......Page 6 Preface: Bill Moore’s Body......Page 8 Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition: The Changing Same......Page 22 1. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness......Page 34 2. Law and Order: Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege......Page 57 3. Immigrant Labor and Identity Politics......Page 88 4. Whiteness and War......Page 111 5. How Whiteness Works: Inheritance, Wealth, and Health......Page 144 6. White Fragility, White Failure, White Fear......Page 152 7. A Pigment of the Imagination......Page 180 8. White Desire: Remembering Robert Johnson......Page 194 9. Lean on Me: Beyond Identity Politics......Page 214 10. Finding Families of Resemblance: ‘‘Frantic to Join . . .the Japanese Army’’......Page 232 11. California: The Mississippi of the 1990s......Page 257 12. Change the Focus and Reverse the Hypnosis: Learning from New Orleans......Page 279 13. White Lives, White Lies......Page 293 Notes......Page 318 Acknowledgments......Page 370 Index......Page 374 "The twentieth anniversary edition of this book about how white people profit from identity politics includes new chapters and extended discussions of political whiteness, vigilante violence, police misconduct and white flight, white fright, white fragility and white fear"-- Provided by publisher