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

“Whiteness is more a condition than a color.”

The importance of this statement about whiteness is that whiteness is associated with power because of the cumulative personal, institutional, and collective opportunities that come with whiteness. This sentence alludes to the ways that whiteness magnifies simple differences in appearance while concealing the systemic advantages of being white. This short statement hence immediately turns simplistic notions of whiteness on its head and announces the nuances that will follow.

“New social movements are emerging in this conjuncture. They are often race based but rarely race bound.”

Lipsitz refers to the intersectionality of racism, which is why he maintains that social movements are “rarely race bound.” He suggests in the text that racism never exists in isolation but is intersected by homophobia, sexism, class subordination, and a variety of other sociopolitical pressures. Here, he exhibits a technique frequently used in the text, which is an internal half rhyme in the prose: “race based” becoming “race bound.” This signals when overly simplified concepts are being subverted.

“Although slavery has existed in many countries without any particular racial dimensions to it, the slave system that emerged in North America soon took on distinctly racial forms.”

Lipsitz explores the ways that white Europeans defined themselves as a race of whites in contrast to Black and Indigenous Americans. Thus the possessive investment in whiteness was institutionalized.

“Yet bankers also profit from the ways in which discrimination creates artificial scarcities in the market.”

The artificial scarcities refer to the way that minorities have to pay more for housing. Minority homeowners are often denied loans from the large banks and are forced to rely on predatory lenders who offer loans at high interest rates. If the homeowners default on the loans the banks can obtain the property cheaply and then charge another person with a high interest loan for the same property, which gives the appearance of scarcity.

“The increased possessive investment in whiteness generated by disinvestment in U.S. cities, factories, and schools since the 1970s disguises as racial problems the general social problems posed by deindustrialization, economic restructuring, and attacks on the welfare state and the social wage.”

This passage highlights the relationship between Neoliberalism and Race as Lipsitz narrates the social problems caused by disinvestment. He uses tripled lists to generate a sense of scale of the disinvestment and resultant problems.

“The Court suffered less from an inability to know than from a firm determination not to know.”

Lipsitz refers to the court of John Roberts and the ways that decisions are made based on deliberately narrow interpretations of precedent so that precedent could be overturned. Lipsitz frequently constructs absurdist phrases such as “determination not to know” to convey the magnitude of the problems with white supremacy.

“White resistance and refusal has led to renegotiation of antidiscrimination law to such a degree that efforts to combat discrimination are now considered discriminatory and efforts to preserve white advantages are treated as civil rights causes.”

This statement is a summation of Lipsitz’s arguments about denial: The position in which white people find themselves when white identity politics makes the beneficiaries of whiteness ignorant about their unearned advantages. In this state of ignorance white people conclude they are the victims of discrimination. The terms resistance, refusal, and renegotiation signify the general reaction of white people to affirmative action policies.

“To manage the anxieties generated by this regression, the new patriots have to affirm all the more intensely their abstract fidelity to leaders, causes, and entities outside themselves.”

Lipsitz argues that the glorification of masculinity and its conflation with patriotism is associated with the identification with a group, the denial or rejection of difference, and a bonding through hatred and violence. This summarizes the thematic ideas about Whiteness and Masculinity.

“Individuals who do not know who they are need to demonize someone else.”

Lipsitz claims that compulsion to demonize the other is a symptom of uncertainty with respect to self-worth and identity. Such individuals attain a sense of identity through the infliction of pain on another person, especially from an aggrieved minority group. Lipsitz’s explanation is generally monosyllabic as he conveys a stark point.

“The lust of the spectator takes center stage in the war on terrorism, eclipsing the responsibilities of the citizen.”

This statement is a testament to the televisual simplification of a war waged in another part of the world. The casualties of individual soldiers and their sacrifices are superseded by the spectacles of masculinity and military power. Lipsitz contends that the war is not fought for territory but to generate media in the form of photos and videos intercalated among television commercials. He uses the theatrical metaphor of “center stage” to reinforce “the lust of the spectator.”

“Yet the possessive investment in whiteness is not an aberration in an otherwise just society. It works in concert with—and flows from—many other forms of inequality and injustice.”

This quotation alludes to the structural advantage of whiteness. Lipsitz maintains that one of the primary functions of the possessive investment in whiteness is to make inequality seem natural. The advantage of whiteness becomes intrinsic to white identity.

“The possessive investment in whiteness creates a vicious circle. The more fearful, fragile, and headed for failure that whites feel, the more avidly they pursue the idealized fantasy of uninhibited power and agency to which they believe their whiteness entitles them.”

Poor, white Americans benefit from whiteness even while they are themselves disenfranchised. Lipsitz argues that the more difficult life becomes for disenfranchised white people, the greater tendency they have of blaming their misfortunes on others. He repeats the phrase “the more” to emphasize the building sense of violence and asset accumulation at all costs in the text.

“The best thing that could happen to the white poor, the white working class, and the white middle class would be to disinvest in their whiteness and join with other exploited and aggrieved people across racial lines.”

The author is urging coordination between disenfranchised groups, regardless of race, instead of only finding common ground through enmity. The building of coalitions across racial lines, however, would first necessitate understanding how the possessive investment in whiteness sustains a system of racialized inequality.

“Whiteness relies on never having to speak its name, on never having to own up to the preferences and privileges it entails.”

This passage constitutes a soundbite that sums up the arguments in the text. It encases a contradiction, since he speaks the name of whiteness while saying that this never happens, thus aiming to convey the uniqueness of the argument.

“Members of dominant groups, however, are always treated as individuals.”

Lipsitz marks the distinction between subordinate groups who are usually considered as a plurality. If one commits a crime and they are from the dominant group then this is seen as the action of an individual without reflecting on the group as a whole. However, when a person in a subordinate group commits a crime, the entire group becomes tainted.

“The wounds that romanticism attempts to salve are real, but the categories that undergird romantic thinking perpetuate rather than remediate the alienations and injustices that it seeks to address and redress.”

Lipsitz refers to the romantic fascination that white people often have regarding the aesthetic endeavors of people of color. It is frequently the case, however, that the romanticized figure is framed in a manner that ignores the difficult social and cultural circumstances that informed their art. Lipsitz alters prefixes here, from “perpetuate” to “remediate” and “address” to “redress” to reflect his method of revising dominant narratives.

“Malcolm X used to say that racism is like a Cadillac: they make a new model every year.”

This quote references a recurring theme in this text: The Persistence of Racism in America. The core tenets remain the same but racism is intersectional and takes on different valences depending on the sociohistorical circumstance. The metaphor of the Cadillac reflects several of the American qualities that, Lipsitz argues, contribute to the persistence of racism in the US: capitalism, consumerism, and individualism.

“This interethnic solidarity among aggrieved racial groups was one of the main products of the World War II experience and one of its most important postwar legacies.”

This statement refers to the shifting racial alliances in the Second World War as Black American soldiers became aware that they were not discriminated against in Asian nations as they were in the US. Lipsitz subverts dominant narratives about “postwar legacies” of global military dominance and portrays a less widely accepted story.

“Disapproval of yesterday’s racism as ideological justification of today’s was not new in the 1960s; it had characterized the entire history of the state’s racial economy.”

Lipsitz argues that it was Mississippians’ confidence in the process and changes that had been made between the days of Jim Crow laws and the 1960s that gave them a permission structure in order to accept the continuing legacy of racism in the present day. Again, Lipsitz constructs soundbite-like sentences when conveying major elements of his argument, the example in this case being “[d]isapproval of yesterday’s racism as ideological justification of today’s.”

“The pleasures of New Orleans come from a crucible of undeniable pain.”

Lipsitz is highlighting the struggle of working-class Black people who experienced persistent police brutality in New Orleans. This is set in sharp contrast to the cultural “pleasures” in New Orleans that are created by disenfranchised people of color who have formed artistic collectives as forms of self-help and political activity. Lipsitz uses this juxtaposition to suggest the cognitive dissonance of white people.

“These forms of self-help serve especially important functions because of the price that Black people in New Orleans pay for the racialization of space and the spatialization of race.”

Lipsitz is discussing methods of self-help in alternate academies like the Mardi Gras Indians that were formed in response to the disinvestment and economic restructuring that deprived Black communities in New Orleans of resources. The phrase, “racialization of space and the spatialization of race,” refers to the segregation and confinement of people of color, who would take it upon themselves to increase the value of their communities through collective action. This phrase is rhythmic and reflects his discussion of music and artistic expression.

“Whiteness in this instance is not just an embodied identity or even solely a systematically structured social advantage but rather a way of knowing and perceiving the world that teaches people to live with evil, to accept it, and to learn to lie about it.”

Lipsitz refers to the set of mechanisms through which racism is preserved and maintained. Social relations are considered from an individual’s perspective as if they were separate from the complex interactions and practice of society as a whole. Lipsitz uses the intense diction of “evil” in this passage, nearing the end of the text, to reinforce the harms of racism that he has explored throughout.

“The lies told by individuals are significant and harmful, sometimes even deadly. But much worse are the core epistemological lies wedded to whiteness.”

The reason the epistemological lies are worse than lies told by individuals is because they are part of a deeper structure of systemic racism embedded in the possessive investment in whiteness, which is premised on these lies. This argument reflects the text’s thematic ideas about Neoliberalism and Racism, since Lipsitz argues that wider systems require more significant attention than simply individuals.