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.
Themes
Neoliberalism and Race
Lipsitz analyzes the relationship between neoliberalism and race and argues that neoliberalism perpetuates racism as a matter of policy. The neoliberal drive to privatize public space is promoted with racialized metaphors. Lipsitz argues that the racist, anti-immigrant movement is a consequence of neoliberal policies put in place years previously, but immigrants of color are blamed for the failures of neoliberalism. By examining neoliberalism as an ideological concept, Lipsitz demonstrates how the effects of neoliberal policies are often overlooked or considered the natural character of capitalist competition. Lipsitz advocates for a critique of the relationship between neoliberalism and race to expose and dispel the tendency to blame aggrieved groups rather than the larger and more complicated structure of neoliberal society.
Neoliberalism is an ideology in which competition, rather than cooperation, is the essential feature of human relations. Neoliberal policies prioritize individualistic self-interest over the value of the common good and public spaces. The tendency of neoliberal policy is to privatize these public spaces, especially spaces available to people of color. Lipsitz writes that the “core contradiction of neoliberal society is race” (xxvii). Race is deployed as a means of devaluing public spaces and institutions by portraying them as unclean and dangerous. Public space and public institutions where people of color congregate and organize are denigrated and become the first sites of privatization.
Lipsitz claims that the basic oppositions of neoliberalism, such as the distinction between public and private or producer and dependent, are framed with racialized metaphors. The dependent side of the opposition is depicted in negative terms as parasitic and associated with an insufficient sense of accountability or responsibility. People who rely on social welfare programs are placed in this category and they are often people of color. But the failure of neoliberalism to create a state of general prosperity is also attributed to race. Lipsitz maintains that the general welfare of the public is ignored as complaints are lodged against people who receive welfare. Social programs are seen as a drag on the economy and a way to disincentive people from assuming personal responsibility.
Neoliberal policies were the catalyst for an increase in immigration, which resulted in a growing anti-immigrant sentiment among white Americans. Lipsitz asserts that neoliberal policies resulted in lower wages in countries such as Mexico which compelled workers, who were previously self-sufficient, to emigrate to the US to find better jobs. Instead of examining the failure of neoliberal policies that provoked this increase in immigration, the immigrants themselves were blamed. Lipsitz sees the racist, anti-immigrant movement, which intensified in the latter portion of the 20th century and continues to the present, as an attempt to protect the possessive investment in whiteness. White voters and owners of property insulate themselves from the consequences of neoliberal policies by scapegoating immigrants of color.
Neoliberalism is not unlike the possessive investment in whiteness in that both are ideological constructs and therefore remain unseen even while their effects are materially self-evident. Lipsitz observes that people of color have been hit the hardest by the structural transformations of neoliberal economics. The defunding of social programs and the reduction in blue-collar jobs in a neoliberal society leads to higher rates of minority unemployment. White anxieties about status and the socioeconomic situation often result in the blaming of aggrieved groups, who are primarily people of color. To see beyond the simplistic, racist reaction to economic conditions, Lipsitz argues that one must consider the structures and policies that made the framework for these outcomes.
Lipsitz advocates for an honest critique of the corrupting tendencies of neoliberalism and the resultant predatory competition, materialism, and general selfishness, that effect “all social groups” (187). The analysis of neoliberalism and race reveals the structural racism in the United States. Lipsitz exposes the policies and ideology of neoliberalism in its racialized forms to probe the source of economic and racial instability and expose the possessive investment in whiteness.
Whiteness and Masculinity
Lipsitz is clear in emphasizing that racism doesn’t exist in isolation. In Lipsitz’s terms, racism is “innately intersectional” and corresponds with other forces like sexism and class subordination (xxviii). In a similar sense, whiteness is also intersectional and intertwines with other identities such as race, gender, and class, and it is through these interconnections that identities are given social meaning. The possessive investment in whiteness is also gendered, and Lipsitz shows how masculinity is an important component of racism and the maintenance of power in the United States. Lipsitz substantiates the ways in which the narrative of the hyper-masculine hero becomes a refuge from the necessity of confronting real socioeconomic problems. However, masculinity is also deployed in the inversion of social relations whereby white masculinity is under threat and the white male has become the victim. Whether masculinity is portrayed in its aggressive form or placed under threat, the trope of the heroic male is projected to protect those who benefit from the possessive investment in whiteness.
Lipsitz characterizes the surge of new patriotism during the presidency of Ronald Reagan as a “quintessential example of this intersecting operation,” especially with regards to a specifically “heterosexual masculinity” (82). For Lipsitz, Reagan was able to conjoin the possessive investment in whiteness with other symbolic investments, such as patriarchy and patriotism. Patriotism, in particular, became a point of intersection for white, male identities, and a site where the bonding of white masculinity could reconcile class differences. The national narrative of white heroism and a protective patriarch was solidified against foreign enemies and internal foes. Lipsitz maintains that this “countersubversive coalition” marked by white, masculine power was pitted against progressive organizations and liberation movements who were blamed for the problems of stagnating wages and social disintegration. In other words, the material problems of the day were alleviated through a fictive refuge of masculinity. The narrative of the hyper-masculine, military hero has remained a constant in the national imagination which, from its inception, has intersected with the possessive investment in whiteness.
The moral panic of the Reagan years was represented as the sad diminishment of the heterosexual, masculine hero, and the antidote was a patriotic jingoism. Lipsitz argues that anxieties about social disintegration were transmitted through “metaphors about threats to the bodies of heterosexual white males” and the economic crisis was portrayed as an “unnatural disruption of racial and gender expectations” (92). A similar narrative regarding the waning power of heterosexual, white males was employed in 1990s California in order to push through legislation that would disenfranchise immigrants titled Proposition 187. Lipsitz claims that the anti-immigrant ballot initiative was promoted through a coalition “held together by images that inverted actual power relations—presenting whites, the wealthy, and males as ‘victims’” (58).The possessive investment in whiteness had been threatened by the presumed advantages given to people of color, women, and the working class. White masculinity itself was portrayed as the aggrieved victim.
Lipsitz shows how hyper-masculinity creates a narrative distraction from material, social, and economic disintegration, replacing a structural problem with a sort of fairy tale. The notorious African American high school principal from Paterson, N.J. on whom the film Lean on Me is based, fulfills another story of aggressive masculinity. Lipsitz argues that Principal Joe Clark, who patrolled the hallways with a baseball bat, fulfills a role of the hyper-masculine male who solves problems through aggression and sheer force of will. Joe Clark’s pugnacious style of discipline was appealing to conservative, white males because “challenges to public order by women and members of aggrieved racial communities can be quelled by male heroes strong enough and determined enough to bully and intimidate their opponents” (183).
Lipsitz demonstrates how the figure of the heterosexual masculine hero is placed in narratives that tend to protect the possessive investment in whiteness. These cultural tropes serve as distractions from problems of systemic racism and the socioeconomic structures that preserve inequality. By showing the crucial intersections of masculinity and whiteness, Lipsitz provides a lens through which to recognize and understand the underlying structure that preserves the possessive investment in whiteness.
The Persistence of Racism in America
Lipsitz considers racism as a pathology and a permanent feature in American life even while it changes over time and reappears with different intensities. He terms this persistent reemergence of racism, “sadism in search of a story” (82). Lipsitz chronicles the reemergence of a particularly sadistic form of racism at the turn of the 21st century and examines the role of socioeconomic circumstance, the election of Barack Obama, and media spectacle as aggravating factors.
Lipsitz contends that the arguments that W. E. B. Du Bois was making in the 1930s are just as relevant today because the “core features of the racial order we confront and contest” are the same (xxv). But he also characterizes racism as an ever-changing force in all of its historical moments. In Lipsitz’s words, “racism is always in all of these moments, but never exactly the same racism” (199). The white identity that has been conditioned to hate and fear the racial other originates in the history of “anti-Indian, anti-Black, and anti-Mexican racism at home” and in the racisms shaped in military struggles abroad (82). Lipsitz describes white racism as a pathology that is always present even if it sometimes remains beneath the surface. And this pathology waits for a host or an intersection with another identity for racism to erupt. The portrait of sadism in search of a story implies its permanence. Sadism in search of a story resurfaces in the current era with the increasingly zealous venting of hatred against demonized others in political discourse just as it reappears in police brutality against Black Americans.
Contrary to the assumption that the election of Barack Obama might introduce a post-racial America, Lipsitz argues that this consequential shift merely initiated “a new system of racial subordination” (xxvi). For Lipsitz, sadism had found another story during the Obama years with the resurrection of “the direct, referential, and snarling racism of white supremacy’s past” now in the 21st century (xxvii). Lipsitz refers to this resurgent, mainstreaming of racism as “recreational hate” (58), which is a synonym for sadism. In the current era, Lipsitz finds evidence of the pervasive presence of recreational hate in the sadistic “celebration of interpersonal hate crimes” and the “lurid and demeaning depictions of nonwhite individuals” in the media (xxvi).
Lipsitz argues that people who lack self-awareness are often compelled to seek out enemies as a way to define themselves, thus creating an opposition between self and a demonized other. To avoid the persistence of the possessive investment in whiteness, Lipsitz advocates for self-awareness so that one can recognize this ideology as an impediment to just society. By examining the ever-changing yet persistent forms of racism, Lipsitz aims to contribute to this awareness.
