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The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”
Lipsitz remarks that, in the years following the Second World War, a journalist asked Richard Wright about the “Negro problem” in the United States (1). Wright answered that there wasn’t a “Negro problem” but instead there was a “white problem” (1). Through this reference, Lipsitz demonstrates how whiteness is everywhere in America though it is sometimes hard to see, even when it functions as an organizing principle in social relations. The possessive investment in whiteness surreptitiously frames much of private and public life. Although race is a cultural concept, it intersects with structures that promote economic advantages for white Americans since Europeans first settled in North America.
That whiteness is so pervasive that it seems to disappear into the background is one of the primary attributes of the possessive investment in whiteness. As another point of reference, Lipsitz quotes the English academic, Richard Dyer, who claims that “white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular” (1). Dyer reaffirms, for Lipsitz, the positioning of whiteness as an unobserved category “against which difference is constructed” (1). Just as the identification of “American” as “white American” to the exclusion of people of color, whiteness in the current context is still the central organizing principle in social relations. The unmarked category of whiteness functions only to disclose that which is different, excluded, and thus not already absorbed in whiteness.
Lipsitz analyzes the way that America was naturalized as a white nation. Once it became clear that it was impractical to enslave Indigenous Americans, who were considered hopelessly inferior, the settlers turned to the African slave trade in order to extract the necessary labor. The racial hierarchies that followed were grounded in the exploitation of non-white peoples. Slavery in North America had a distinctly racial dimension, with Black associated with slavery and white with freedom. However, the settlers also pitted one race against another, for example, by prohibiting enslaved Black people from traveling in “Indian country” (3). Immigrants from Mexico and Asia were placed in competition as they sought the approval of white people as a possible source of opportunity.
The rewards of whiteness have been created and recreated in each period of American life, from Native American dispossession to the emancipation of enslaved people to the desegregation drives of the early 1960s. Racism is renewed in different forms in each period. Lipsitz argues that policies that are written in “race-neutral” language such as those from the New Deal era further entrench the possessive investment in whiteness (5). Many of these policies determine the allocation of resources that always advantage white Americans. Highway building projects and the expansion of segregated suburbs contributed to the dilapidation of inner-city neighborhoods that were populated with non-white people who were further disadvantaged by discrimination in housing, education, and hiring.
Lipsitz highlights that racism is not always overt. For example, in the 1990s lending market, people of color were given much riskier loans. It was in this decade that a backlash erupted against affirmative action, which was grounded in the possessive investment of whiteness. Because whiteness is unnamed, it seemed reasonable for some to assume that affirmative action was unfair to white people. Lipsitz argues that both “social welfare” and free market policies and contribute to the possessive investment of whiteness without seeming to be overtly racist. Lipsitz then introduces the category of liberal individualism, which is the idea that people are self-contained, autonomous individuals, and that there should be strict neutrality regarding the law. He maintains that liberal individualism, rather than ignorance and intolerance, provides the primary fortification for the possessive investment in whiteness. Liberal individualism provides an atomized vision of society because it fails to describe the collective nature of human experience.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Law and Order: Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege”
Lipsitz argues that both liberals and conservatives have carried out racialized agendas in furtherance of the possessive investment in whiteness without using explicitly racial terms. American society is oblivious to the possessive investment in whiteness and thus there seems to be no correspondence between the disadvantages with which minorities are forced to contend and the advantages that benefit white people. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 have led American society to assume that problems of race have been alleviated and therefore any disadvantages that people of color face are attributed to innate deficiencies rather than systemic discrimination. Lipsitz argues that civil rights laws have only contributed to the possessive investment in whiteness because the civil rights legislation has been written so that the laws are ineffective and unenforceable. He follows a similar trend with regard to housing, education, and employment, where antidiscrimination legislation exists in the abstract without the practical means to institute changes that would make the system fairer.
Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, federal mortgage insurance programs were exempted from antidiscrimination laws so that discrimination in home lending would continue. Lipsitz describes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s advocacy for fair housing practices and makes note of the fact that legislation on fair housing was renegotiated and passed only following his murder. When racial zoning laws were overturned in 1917, many municipalities ignored the rulings and proceeded as if the laws had not been changed. Mid-century anti-segregation laws were routinely broken, and yet these actions largely went unpunished, just as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was greeted with resistance and refusal to follow the law. In each of these cases, “white resistance rather than compliance” defined the outcome (27). Politicians tend to support antidiscrimination legislation in the abstract while undermining the mechanisms in practice.
With regards to education, a similar pattern is observed in that segregation is outlawed in the abstract while the legislation fails to provide the means to dismantle a system that disadvantages students of color. Lipsitz makes a similar argument regarding school desegregations with reference to the Brown v. Board of Education case. Lipsitz addresses this “ideological inconsistency” by claiming that “whites today profess support for school integration—yet continue to block efforts to desegregate” (37).
Discrimination by employers in terms of hiring practices serves the possessive investment in whiteness by consistently giving the advantage to white people seeking employment, and federal labor policies disenfranchise people of color. Across the country, states increasingly passed fair-hiring legislation that was ineffective because there were few provisions for enforcement. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations supported Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which promoted fair hiring with the hope that the appearance of being committed to integration would delay measures that would put it into practice.
Lipsitz uses a story about a construction worker who said that he had nothing to pass on to his sons except for his trade. When it was suggested, this intergenerational transfer was discriminatory, the worker was offended, as this just seemed to be the natural order of things. Lipsitz writes that the worker “understood very well the value of his whiteness and what it would be worth to his son to pass it across generations” (43). He argues that whiteness is a form of “property,” and that white supremacy is embedded in asset accumulation, which is requisite for upward mobility and is the purview of white Americans.
When the Supreme Court after 2005 led by Chief Justice John Roberts chose to ignore legal precedent and overturn lower court decisions in favor of white supremacy in the 2007 Parents Involved in Community Schools case, Lipsitz described the Court’s decision as based in the “epistemology of ignorance” (47). The epistemology of ignorance is an inverted epistemology based not on an “inability to know” but on a “firm determination not to know” (47). This inverted epistemology erases certain kinds of knowledge and marginalizes others in order to protect the possessive investment in whiteness. Lipsitz accuses the Court of persistently elevating the comfort of white people over the rights of Black people. Despite its flagrant disregard for legal precedent, the Court’s decision in Parents Involved did continue one tradition of Supreme Court jurisprudence about desegregation: It elevated the convenience and comfort of white people over the constitutional rights of Black people. Lipsitz singles out Clarence Thomas as exhibiting a “petty malevolence” in his opinions (50). The conservative justices, who pose as strict constructionists relying on legal precedent, in practice rule quite differently, in this case overturning voluntary segregation laws.
Lipsitz cites Michael Omi’s distinction between “referential racism” (snarly, open antipathy) and “inferential racism” to explain the workings of the Court in their implicit promotion of white supremacy. Inferential racism is aligned to the epistemology of ignorance and the ways that public figures disown racist content while tacitly promoting white supremacy. Inferential racism gives these figures a veneer of innocence.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Immigrant Labor and Identity Politics”
The epigraph of this chapter by James Baldwin includes the phrase, “that victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim” (55).
Lipsitz first recounts the 1994 passage of California Proposition 187, a measure that would deny medical services and education for undocumented immigrants. He claims that the legislation compelled citizens to inform the authorities of people suspected of living and laboring in the US without proper documentation. Lipsitz sees the effects of Proposition 187 as essentially criminalizing labor. The second example he provides is an Arizona law enacted in 2010, SB 1070, that required police officers to ask for proof of citizenship from people who appeared to be undocumented. In essence, this allowed racial profiling for the entire Latinx population of Arizona. In the same year, Arizona passed HB 2281, a law that would prohibit the teaching of ethnic studies in public schools.
In each of these cases, measures were taken to reaffirm white identity and the possessive investment in whiteness while disenfranchising people who emigrated from Mexico and Central America. Lipsitz argues that these legislative measures were promoted through a narrative of reverse racism or the idea that whites were victim to the unfair advantages given to racial minorities. The very passage of these laws provided a permission structure for racism and what Lipsitz describes as “the pleasures of recreational hate” (58). Lipsitz emphasizes the fact that the white voters and legislators who passed these laws had no intention of divesting themselves from the benefits of the cheap labor provided by the undocumented immigrants who were the target of these measures.
Lipsitz maintains that the irruption of open racism at the turn of the century begins with the permission structure offered to white people with Proposition 187. In Lipsitz’s terms, white Americans were invited to “express openly and in public the racial resentments, prejudices, and paranoid fantasies that they previously entertained largely in private” (58). Recreational hate became popular. The presidential election of Donald J. Trump attests to this mainstreaming of racism. Lipsitz contends that evocative racist stereotypes are used to conceal actual social interactions, such as the relationship between the white California electorate and undocumented immigrants. He credits Asian American studies scholar, Lisa Lowe, for the formulation that “successful racist stereotypes are not just picturesque untruths but carefully constructed images designed to make lies more attractive than truth” (62). Lipsitz seeks to plumb the depths of the untruths to expose the possessive investment in whiteness.
Lipsitz further details efforts to ban ethnic studies in Arizona through HB 2281 and contrasts the racist effort to eliminate these classes with the “clear record of achievement” of students who enrolled in these courses (63). The students who were involved in ethnic studies statistically were far more successful in their academic pursuits than their fellow students. The drive to ban ethnic studies (or, in some cases, to make them illegal) was justified because “it advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government” and “promoted resentment toward a race or class of people” (63). Lipsitz details the reasons that these claims are invalid. For Lipsitz, the backlash is actually “a phobic projection of what people possessed by whiteness might imagine ethnic studies courses to be” (63).
Lipsitz maintains that while all racialized populations suffer from the possessive investment in whiteness, the social and historical circumstances among groups are different. The experiences vary because of the intersectionality of class, sexual orientation, and gender. Lipsitz claims that “no one lives a life entirely as an ethnic subject” (67). Some of the critiques of identity politics are based on the allegiance to group interests rather than the civic communication crossing racial and social boundaries. But Lipsitz argues that the attacks on identity politics are typically inspired by the defense of the privileges of whiteness and the maintenance of the possessive investment in whiteness. He calls for cooperation and solidarity among all immigrant communities so that organizing isn’t limited by their own political and social identities. The connections between and across ethnic groups are based on knowledges and not just ethnic identities. Lipsitz reiterates the point that knowledge is power, stating that “strategic insights emanate from the ways in which having less power can make it important to have more knowledge” (77).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Lipsitz begins the chapter by subverting a common epithet. He relates a story about the expatriate author and novelist Richard Wright who, in the years following the Second World War, was asked by a French reporter about the “Negro problem” in America. Wright responded by explaining that “there isn’t any Negro problem; there is only a white problem” (1). This subversive reframing of the “Negro problem” epithet reflects the aims of the book: to unsettle the dominant construction of whiteness. Later, Lipsitz reiterates that “the racial problem in the United States remains at heart a white problem” (25). The claim that the racial problem is a white problem is intentionally provocative because he attacks the easy conclusion that it is not white people who suffer from racism. The dialectical twist implies that it is the white American’s way of thinking, or not thinking, about race that must be probed. Lipsitz further uses a dialectical turn of phrase when exploring the supreme court’s decision about education: “[T]hey characterized as discrimination the only practical and plausible means of reducing discrimination” (52).
Lipsitz provides a historical chronicle of the specifically racialized history of America to expose the destructive basis of the possessive investment in whiteness, from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples to slavery and segregation. Lipsitz provides this data-rich framework not just to reveal a violent history, but also to show that the rewards of whiteness have been formed and reformed over time. This supports the claim that racism is always present yet always in flux, introducing the theme of The Persistence of Racism in America. Lipsitz provides this historical data to expose the ways in which the privileges of whiteness are hidden even in the process of progressive social change. Lipsitz mixes historical exploration with dissection of contemporary events in the text to balance immediate and fresh relevance with a sense of gravitas.
Lipsitz cites data to corroborate his argument that the laws and measures that have been passed to create the conditions for a more equitable system include loopholes. He frames historical events in terms of a cause-and-effect scenario: “[T]he murder of Dr. King in 1968—and the riots that erupted in its wake—forced another renegotiation of fair-housing issues” (28). This is a rhetorical flourish that creates a relationship without precise, historical corroboration. However, this provocative sentence is placed amid paragraphs of data that are cited from a variety of sources, such as newspaper accounts and government reports. The data provided supports Lipsitz’s argument that equitable policies are affirmed in the abstract even while actions are taken to avoid their implementation.
In Chapter 3, Lipsitz uses more subjective language when exploring historical and legal data. When he outlines some of the policies of Proposition 187, he describes it delivering “excruciating pain” to “defenseless residents.” This is emotive since it uses explicitly violent imagery, but it is intercalated with the list of the concrete particulars. Lipsitz therefore uses this language to convey his point that seemingly innocuous measures cause major harm. However, in the paragraphs that follow, Lipsitz clarifies that “nearly all of their provisions were invalidated by the courts, as opponents of the measures had predicted” (57), which negates the detailed list he provided in the first paragraph. Therefore, Lipsitz employs hyperbole in his exposure of the possessive investment in whiteness. He points to the fact that people voted for the extreme measure in the first place, regardless that most of the policies would be invalidated. This demonstrates the swelling of white supremacy. Even the subtitle of this section of the chapter, “criminalizing immigrant labor,” is hyperbolic.
In some sense, the examination of HB 2281 in Chapter 3 is a device to further Lipsitz’s argument because, like Proposition 187, the measure was rejected by a federal district court judge who concluded that the law was based on “racial animus rather than concerns about educational quality” (65). To Lipsitz, the attacks on ethnic studies confirms the compulsion to protect the investment in whiteness.
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