The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. - Review - book reviews

Progressive, The, Dec, 1998 by Susan Douglas

This year, I am recommending only one book--George Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Temple University Press, 1998). Lipsitz is best known for showing how popular culture and the changing fortunes of the working class and people of color transformed the United States after World War II. This new book brings together his fierce passion for racial justice with his talent for cultural analysis.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is meant to grab white people by the lapels and shake them out of their complacency about all of the myriad, interlocking, and sometimes subtle ways that white privilege is achieved and protected. A major theme of the book is that "whiteness has a cash value." Through banking practices, educational arrangements, the criminal justice system, and media representations, whites--whether consciously or not--are able to "pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations."

Lipsitz is especially compelling when he analyzes how seemingly race-neutral policies in the United States preserve race privilege. He reminds us that the Social Security Act excluded domestic and farm workers--a majority of them people of color--from benefits. The Federal Housing Act of 1934, touted as making home ownership possible for millions, created a federal housing agency that channeled almost all of the loan money toward whites and away from communities of color. The urban renewal and federal highway projects of the 1950s and 1960s "devastated minority neighborhoods," he argues. "More than 60 percent of those displaced by urban renewal were African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, or members of other minority racial groups."

Today in Houston, 75 percent of the city's garbage incinerators and all of its garbage dumps are located in black neighborhoods. Around the country, Lipsitz informs us, "60 percent of African Americans and Latinos live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites." The systematic racial bias in home lending, which is still quite alive and well, means that in Atlanta, for example, "home loan institutions gave five times as many home loans to whites as to blacks" in the late 1980s. It also means that a bank in Boston gave three times as many mortgages to low-income whites as they did to low-income blacks in 1991.

Lipsitz moves beyond the black/white binary to examine how Latinos and Asian Americans are discriminated against in the labor market. And he argues that successive American wars in Asia since the conquest of the Philippines have fueled the image of Asians as "foreign enemies incapable of being assimilated into a U.S. national identity."

Lipsitz's cultural criticisms cut to the quick. In his discussion of the impulse to romanticize blues singers like Robert Johnson, Lipsitz reminds us that white fantasies about the wandering loner who escapes the confines of bourgeois life erases all the reasons that Johnson and many black men had to flee their homes during America's epidemic of lynchings and also obscures the collective, community roots of blues music. Lipsitz urges whites to learn from black music "without colonizing their pain for our pleasure."

Finally, everyone should read Lipsitz's fervent defense of affirmative action in the final chapter, "California: the Mississippi of the 1990s." It's a scathing riposte to those who want to return the academy to what it used to be a shining fortress that was one of the best protectors of the "possessive investment in whiteness" in the country.

Susan Douglas teaches Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.