The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded EditionIn 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
1 | |
Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege | 24 |
3 Immigrant Labor and Identity Politics | 48 |
4 Whiteness and War | 70 |
Inheritance Wealth and Health | 105 |
Remembering Robert Johnson | 118 |
Beyond Identity Politics | 140 |
Antiblack Racism and White Identity | 159 |
Other editions - View all
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from ... George Lipsitz Limited preview - 2006 |
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from ... George Lipsitz No preview available - 1998 |
Common terms and phrases
affirmative action African American aggrieved racial Angeles antiracist Asian Americans benefits blues California campaign Chicano citizens civil rights coalitions communities of color conflict Connerly Court culture desegregation discrimination economic ethnic European Americans Fair Housing Fannie Lou Hamer federal fight films find first five gender groups identified identity immigrants important influence investment in whiteness James JAMES BALDWIN Japanese Americans justice labor Latino loans low-wage Malcolm Malcolm X Mexican American military minority Mississippi mobilization Moore’s narratives Native Americans Negro neighborhoods neoconservative nonwhite office officers officials opportunities Orleans patriotism percent policies political possessive investment profits Proposition 187 race racism Rawick Reagan Renee Stout resistance Robert Johnson role secured segregation significance slavery slaves Sniderman and Piazza social society state’s story struggle supremacist Sweet Cadillac Swing Low United Vietnam Vietnam War wages white supremacy women workers World York
Popular passages
Page 1 - As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.4 To identify, analyze, and oppose the destructive consequences of whiteness, we need what Walter Benjamin called "presence of mind.