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.
Index of Terms
Asset Accumulation
The phrase, “the possessive investment of whiteness,” is generative in the sense that Lipsitz considers it first as a social fiction but also as a fact of American society that has material consequences. This concept runs in tandem with “asset accumulation,” the opportunities for which are reserved for white people who benefit from the advantages of the possessive investment in whiteness. The “cash value” of whiteness comes in from the basic advantages in securing housing, education, and employment, which are unavailable to Black people. The possessive investment in whiteness is about protecting the privileges of white people while simultaneously depriving the same opportunities of asset accumulation and upward mobility to people of color. Lipsitz argues that the net worth of a Black person reflects the history of discrimination as past opportunities that were denied obstruct present opportunities for asset accumulation.
Liberal Individualism
Liberal individualism is a philosophical viewpoint that people are autonomous individuals who are entitled to live according to their own judgment. Individuals should be free to exercise their rights with minimal interference from the state. The state should act with complete neutrality rather than with moral purpose and use coercion only to keep individuals from coercing others. Individual autonomy should be balanced with the recognition and respect for the individual autonomy of others. Self-reliance and self-determination are the ideal features of the liberal individual, thus liberal individualism emphasizes the individual rather than the community. In its negative connotation it is associated with rugged individualism.
Lipsitz emphasizes the deleterious effects in social relations caused by liberal individualism because, by definition, the collective dimensions of human experience are rejected in favor of autonomous existence. In this sense, racist acts would only be considered as the problem or fault of a single individual rather than a manifestation of deeper, systemic issues. Furthermore, the disenfranchisement of groups of color would be blamed on individual character rather than the results of long-term, structural racism.
Racialization
Racialization is the gradual, historical process through which racial meaning is ascribed to aggrieved groups and to social patterns that serve to solidify and maintain racial status and hierarchy. Racialization takes place through ascription and the logic of difference. It is a form of othering. Race is a social construction that is not based in science and yet disenfranchised groups and the social practices that foster inequality come to be defined in terms of race. Racialization is established through bureaucratic structures and procedures that affix labels of race to marginalized peoples. Racial meanings define various social procedures from welfare to crime that are in turn conflated with race. In other words, welfare and crime become racialized. The racialization of space refers to the ways that different neighborhoods come to reflect the power relations in society. Lipsitz argues that in the US, space is racially marked so that demography has a direct bearing on whether one is excluded or included in terms of home ownership and access to public services such as health care and education. Racialized populations are grouped, managed, and organized through the racialization of space, whether the boundaries are set informally or formally. Racialization is relational in the sense that racialized positions change in relation to other racialized position so that there is not a single racial hierarchy. Racialization is a process through which the connections between considerations of race and seemingly nonracial concepts, like politics, become strengthened over time.
