The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition

by George Lipsitz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592134953
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	08/21/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	423 KB

About the Author

George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Bill Moore’s Body
1. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
2. Law and Order: Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege
3. Immigrant Labor and Identity Politics
4. Whiteness and War
5. How Whiteness Works: Inheritance, Wealth, and Health
6. White Desire: Remembering Robert Johnson
7. Lean on Me: Beyond Identity Politics
8. "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac": Antiblack Racism and White Identity
9. "Frantic to Join...the Japanese Army": Beyond the Black-White Binary
10. California: The Mississippi of the 1990s
Notes
Acknowledgments [to come]
Index

Editorial Reviews

"If we could only take one book with us into the 21st century, this is the one I would choose. With lucidity and passion, George Lipsitz reveals that so-called 'color-blind' public policy actually contributes to the maintenance of racism; that white privilege and the demonizing of colored people are two sides of the same coin; and that whiteness is both a huge subsidy as well as a noose around the necks of working-class white folk. His insights into how the color line works in the realm of public policy, politics, and culture, and what we must do to destroy it, can save our lives."
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America

From the Publisher