56 pages • 1 hour read
George LipsitzThe Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary: “Bill Moore’s Body”
Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and racist brutality and murder.
The preface begins with an epigraph, which is a quote by James Baldwin: “I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason” (vii).
Lipsitz argues that the “possessive investment in whiteness” is a product of private prejudice and public policy that reinforces the racial hierarchy in society (viii). The “cash value” of whiteness accumulates through the advantages of discriminatory housing markets, unfavorable educational opportunities, and the inheritance of intergenerational wealth. The resources and opportunities available to white Americans are an incentive to maintain this access by continuing to invest in whiteness. For Lipsitz, even though whiteness is a delusion or fiction in the sense that the idea of racial identity is a social construct that has no scientific basis, the material consequences in terms of the distribution of wealth, power, and prestige are self-evident. The adjective “possessive” denotes the relationship between whiteness and the accumulation of assets. Lipsitz maintains that white supremacy persists through indirect means as a system that protects white privileges while denying such access to communities of color. Like property, whiteness is an investment and a means of accumulating more privileges or properties.
Lipsitz’ exploration of whiteness begins with the story of Bill Moore, a white man who was shot to death along a highway in Alabama on April 23, 1963. Moore had embarked on a one-man march to peacefully protest racism in the south. He was disturbed by the Mississippi governor’s efforts to prevent desegregation at the University of Mississippi, and especially the violence that ensued when a mob of whites attacked the National Guard that President Kennedy had sent to enforce compliance. Moore planned to march from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi while wearing a sandwich board that read on one side, “Equal Rights for All: Mississippi or Bust” and “Black and White: Eat at Joe’s” on the other (ix). Moore’s murder served as a catalyst for civil rights activists. Six weeks after Moore’s death, Medgar Evers, the secretary for the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), vowed to continue the struggle against segregation and he was summarily shot and killed by a white supremacist. The deaths of these men compelled people throughout the country to address the pervasiveness of white supremacy in American society. Lipsitz writes that he was one of those people so inspired. He was struck by the fact that a white man had protested white supremacy and was killed by other white men.
For Lipsitz, the culpability for these murders does not lie solely with the men who pulled the trigger. He argues that these horrible crimes took place because too many people in society refused to openly condemn white supremacy. The example of Bill Moore is still relevant in the 21st century because people have still not addressed the structural, cultural, and institutional forces that racialize the rights and opportunities in the US. Lipsitz contends that the possessive investment in whiteness is not only structural and economic but also psychological. Whiteness is emotional; it is ideological; and it shapes the individual’s sense of identity. White supremacy manifests not just in overt racists acts but appears in various forms of inequality and discrimination. Lipsitz emphasizes the interconnections between race, gender, and class to identify the ways in which politics, power, and race in society still maintain an allegiance to white supremacy.
Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition Summary: “The Changing Same”
Lipsitz uses the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness to assess what has changed over the years with regard to racism in the United States and what has remained the same. He suggests that those who read either the 1998 or the 2006 edition of the book may have assumed that the possessive investment in whiteness was a vestigial remnant of a distant racist past and that racism would continue to fade away. Lipsitz declares that racial subordination is even worse today. Lipsitz maintains that his book is relevant today because it has become part of a chorus of other books and articles that are persuasive, not merely on their own but in conjunction with the larger framework of intellectual activity and awareness. His book is part of a dialogue in progress.
Lipsitz began writing The Possessive Investment in Whiteness in response to the attacks on affirmative action that were set in motion in California in the 1990s. He recognizes the improvements in race relations in the years following the first publication but still points to the structural impediments that tend to support racist practices. Lipsitz considers two events that served as catalysts for social change: the situation for Black communities in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005 and the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2005 followed by the acquittal of the police officer responsible for his death. He calls this the Katrina-Ferguson Conjuncture and contends that new social movements are emerging from these events. The #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName protests are examples of these mobilizations.
Racism, for Lipsitz, is intersectional in the sense that it does not exist in isolation. The intersections of racism with gender, sexuality, and class illustrate the pervasiveness of the possessive investment in whiteness. He emphasizes the fluid processes and practices from which racism emerges and argues that it is constantly changing. “The racial order,” he writes, “gets made and remade every day” (xxix).
Preface-Introduction Analysis
As with the rest of the chapters of this text, the preface begins with an epigraph that is a quote by James Baldwin. Baldwin’s sentiment alludes to the fact that whiteness is a social fiction that is not grounded in science, and it relates to Lipsitz argument that “whiteness is more a condition than a color” (viii). Yet, whiteness has real consequences in terms of behavior and a white Americans’ material conditions.
Lipsitz tells the story of Bill Moore, the white postal worker who attempted to deliver a message of anti-racism to the south and was shot and killed. Storytelling in this case is a way to situate the sociopolitical critique in a relevant setting and show that, even 50 years after the murder of Bill Moore, America is still beset with these social problems. This story is also emotive as it provides a personal dimension that ends in individual tragedy.
Lipsitz refers to more true events when he chronicles those that were transformative in terms of racial awareness, beginning with Hurricane Katrina and the response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. He terms the Katrina-Ferguson Conjuncture; this underpins the book’s strategy of exploring well-known events or concepts but grouping them together in specific or unusual ways to convey an argument about white supremacy. These events are framed in terms of Neoliberalism and Race. One of the reasons that Lipsitz’s text is evergreen is that the core tenets of the racial order are still in place.
Lipsitz reinforces this personal dimension of the story of Bill Moore since it leads to an important autobiographical detail: Lipsitz read about this crime when he was a teenager. In Lipsitz’s words, “the bullets that killed Bill Moore changed my life” (xii). He juxtaposes the words “killed” and “life” to highlight the fact that this individual tragedy also led to renewed hope and energy for change. He goes on in the Introduction to offer more autobiographical detail about the impetus to write The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. He describes the strategy sessions in which he took part as activists planned responses to the attacks on affirmative action in California in the 1990s. It was at this point when he began to assemble evidence for the book. Both the Preface and Introduction include metatextual detail that refers to the writing process itself to contextualize and personalize the text.
In the Introduction, Lipsitz provides an assessment of this work 20 years after its first publication by contextualizing the sociopolitical landscape of the first decades of the 21st century. This elevates the sense of significance of the text, since it alerts readers to the fact that the work has been published in several editions, and it aims to engage the reader by highlighting its contemporary relevance.
Lipsitz situates his text in conversation with other anti-racist publications to emphasize the importance of dialogue. This reflects his portrayal of collective action of organizations, such as the NAACP in the Prologue, suggesting that the book takes part in theoretical collective action. The book has shifted scholarly discussions about race and has changed the ways in which white supremacy is framed, but it has not done so in a vacuum. Lipsitz demonstrates his intersectional method by drawing attention to the other disciplines and interests that have taken part in the conversation.
