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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.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Whiteness and War”
Lipsitz sees racial projects in the United States as historically forged in combat. He cites Chickasaw scholar Jodi A. Byrd who argues that the United States uses its military and economic might to “make Indian” other peoples and nations that might obstruct the military and economic goals of the country (78).The fact that war machinery is often given names associated with the Indigenous past (Black Hawk, Apache Longbow, Lakota, etc.) bears witness to this legacy of conquest. Lipsitz argues that the possessive investment in whiteness is learned and finds legitimacy in warfare.
Lipsitz explains that anti-Asian violence in America is grounded in the view that Asians are deemed unassimilable and unwanted by white Americans. The decades of wars in Asia contribute to this perception and its corollary, that true citizenship is based on white identity. Racist tendencies tend to conflate Asian Americans as external enemies of the nation. Fear of the Asian peril originates in the history of racism against Indigenous people, Black people, and Mexicans at home and against Arab and Latin American people abroad, formed through military struggles.
Whiteness does not work in isolation but functions a part of the broader intersectionality of class, race, gender, and sexuality. In the postwar era, patriotism masks class antagonisms and brings reconciliation by channeling the intersections of race and class into the vilification of a foreign foe. For Lipsitz, the patriotic renewal during the presidency of Ronald Reagan was an expression of this interchange in that the possessive investment in whiteness was fused with the themes of heterosexual masculinity and patriarchal protection. The patriotic fervor that arose during the Reagan years overshadowed the diminution of wages, the reduction in social services, and the collapse of infrastructure. If the failures of neoliberal economic policy were considered, then the blame was quickly attributed to antiwar, civil rights, and feminist activists.
One narrative presented social problems of the day “as a crisis of the declining value of white male and heterosexual identity” (82-83). Patriotic and military spectacle gave audiences, in Lipsitz’s terms, the chance to “recommit themselves to the nation without moving beyond personal emotions and private concerns” (87). Americans could tap into the excitement of military action with the safety of spectatorship. Lipsitz maintains that there is “sensual gratification” in the nation-state presented as a sort of spectacle. World War II became a vehicle for patriotic renewal because it was considered a “good” war as opposed to the war in Vietnam. However, Lipsitz contends that the nostalgia for World War II was bound to a desire for a pre-integration America, when the war heroes were white (according to white historical narratives). The push for desegregation after the Second World War was tied to the imperatives of the Cold War in the sense that segregation was in contradiction to the image of America as a defender of freedom.
Lipsitz demonstrates how 1970s war films about Vietnam, such as The Deer Hunter, tend to demonize Asians, whereas films about war in the 1980s, such as Rambo, tend to glorify war through fantasies of power and domination. Lipsitz notes that in the Rambo films and other adventure stories related to Vietnam, the protagonists achieve “underdog status by reversing reality” (96) and become lone wolf fighters with primitive armaments fighting against vastly superior technology. Lipsitz compares films about the Second World War to Vietnam War movies and demonstrates that in the latter case the films “seethe” (97) with class grievance. In Lipsitz terms, “draftees and enlisted men hate their officers” and “soldiers hate college students” (97). But in every film about the Vietnam War, the protagonist is a white male even though in the real war, the soldiers were disproportionately African American and Latinx.
The glorification of war in cinema contributed to the new patriotism. The attacks of September 11, 2001 renewed exuberant displays of jingoism and patriotism. Lipsitz argues that the possessive investment in whiteness offered a permission structure for retribution against Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants with dark skin. The terrorist attack did not compel people toward violence so much as it justified deep-seated racist tendencies. The war on terrorism was viewed by the public through a televisual spectacle that renewed the glorification of patriarchal power and masculine military heroism in American life.
Chapter 5 Summary: “How Whiteness Works: Inheritance, Wealth, and Health”
Lipsitz examines Karyn McKinney’s text, Being White: Stories of Race and Racism, which is a study of the racial sensibilities of her white college students; in particular, she looks at how they deny their privileges. She assigns her students an article by Peggy McIntosh about white privilege, and her students merely respond to the “micro-level” privileges (such as not being racially profiled by security personnel), without addressing the structural, systemic groundwork that is the source of these privileges. Lipsitz uses the stories in this text to support his argument regarding the possessive investment in whiteness. In particular, Lipsitz acknowledges that white identity is often passive, unintentional, and thus needs to become aware. In the epigraph to this chapter, James Baldwin speaks to this condition: “White Americans have been encouraged to continue dreaming, and black Americans have been alerted to the necessity of waking up” (111). Lipsitz concedes that McKinney’s students “should not be blamed for their unwillingness to face facts” (111), a point which attests to the problematic and passive collective of white identity. Lipsitz writes that James Baldwin averred that “the entire history of their nation has conspired to keep the truth from them” (111).
Lipsitz maintains that the systemic structure of inequality in the US is evident both in terms of wealth and in terms of health. Black Americans do not have the advantage of unearned wealth that is available to whites through generational inheritance, which increases the wealth gap between the races. Black people also do not have access to the same quality of healthcare that is available to wealthy white people. The possessive investment in whiteness keeps white people from seeing the structural inequalities in society so that they are compelled to view the unfairness in the system as natural and inevitable. Black families can’t trace their wealth back to the Homestead Act of 1862 from which Black people were excluded, and neither can they claim generational wealth from the midcentury Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans that were offered almost exclusively to white Americans. Past discrimination is combined with current discriminatory practices, such as mortgage lending and automobile credit financing, which provides further obstacles to the accumulation of wealth. Because the opportunities for home ownership and advantageous rental conditions are limited for Black people, they are more likely to live in areas where toxic hazards are more common. Whether they are insured or not, Black people receive less preventive care and face patterns of delayed medical attention. Lipsitz demonstrates statistically how these outcomes are self-evident and contends that the health gap and the wealth gap are inextricably entwined.
Chapter 6 Summary: “White Fragility, White Failure, White Fear”
Lipsitz explains that the persistence of the possessive investment in whiteness does not mean that there is no discontentment and misery in a society stratified by class. In a stratified society with a shrunken middle class, one that is “insensitive to the indigent and the ill” (128), familial dysfunction and personal misery is common. Some white Americans see whiteness as the single advantage that they maintain, yet even for the disenfranchised, whiteness provides a safety net below which one will not fall. Lipsitz argues that a vicious circle emanates from the possessive investment in whiteness: The more fragile and discontented whites feel, the more aggressively they pursue the idealized vision of power and advantage to which they feel entitled by being white. When this leads to more frustration, whites feel victimized and search for a scapegoat on whom to blame their misfortune. In the 21st century when neoliberalism benefits primarily the interests of the wealthiest people, lower class white people see themselves correctly as dispossessed. Their grievances are often translated into moral panics and hatred of other groups rather than inequality built into the economic system.
Lipsitz examines Dylan Roof, who massacred a group of Black people at a church in Charleston in 2015. Roof’s racism was based in assumptions about biologically inherited traits and the belief that Black people were genetically inferior. He hated what he perceived to be the “innately violent nature of Blacks” (121), and Lipsitz implies a level of projection in the young man who was seized with violent urges. For Lipsitz, Roof suffered from the belief in “reverse racism,” which is the notion that in the current era the “tables have been turned” with regard to race and that “the only racism that exists is racism against whites” (123). In this framework, disappointment, dashed expectations, and an obstruction to the privileges of being white is viewed as an onerous racial injury. Roof was inspired by the court case that led to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Lipsitz offers the narrative of James Jackson who in 2017 went out to stalk and kill Black men because they were “mixing with white women” (124). Jackson stabbed a 60-year-old man multiple times on a street in Manhattan. Jeremy Christian was riding a bus and noticed a woman wearing a Muslim hijab, which infuriated him, and when he began to yell at them to “get out of the country” (124), some other passengers tried to intervene. Christian stabbed and killed two of them. He lists several more anecdotes about racist men who have killed people of color in the US.
Lipsitz argues that these examples share similarities, such as the overwhelming white fragility experienced by these men and the assumption that the white aggressor is fit and entitled to decide who should be fit and entitled to freedom and who should not. This assumption, Lipsitz argues, is grounded in the violence of American history. Anti-immigration activists lend to the possessive investment in whiteness by creating an atmosphere of heightened fear and suspicion about immigrants who are people of color. Lipsitz argues that the anti-immigrant movement provided a permission structure that exacerbated the murderous impulses of people like Dylan Roof.
One of the conceits of being white is to attribute explicit racism to lower class whites rather than the discourse in which affluent whites take part in their places of work and play. Lipsitz suggests that when people exhibit racist behavior, it is not based in the imagined deficiency of people of color but rather the expression of the fear that they will lose what they own as whites. These racial fears come to the surface in times of crisis and economic uncertainty.
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Pigment of the Imagination”
Structural inequalities are accepted and legitimated in the cultural imagination through racially distinct images and ideas that appear in newspapers, television, and film. Whiteness is hidden in this system of representation through what Lipsitz refers to as “chains of evasions, erasures,” and omissions (147). “Whiteness relies on never having to speak its name,” Lipsitz writes, “on never having to own up to the preferences and privileges it entails” (147).
Lipsitz demonstrates these claims through the omission of whiteness in two sources of media. In a 2003 New York Times article about young and successful executives, Nicole Piasecki was featured because she had secured a seat on the board of directors of Weyerhaeuser even though she was 20 years younger than her colleagues. The journalist attributed her success to skills she had gained in marketing and sales without mentioning important family ties that placed her in that position in the first place: Her great-great-grandfather had founded Weyerhaeuser Corporation. In a 2007 Nightline episode about childhood poverty, political science professor Luke Charles Harris was featured because he is an Black American male who grew up in poverty and yet achieved a position of stature. The host attributed his success to the intervention of a white woman who raised him as her own without mentioning the affirmative action programs that facilitated his success in college. Lipsitz demonstrates how whiteness is invisible in these accounts. In the first case, whiteness is not considered as particularly helpful to Piasecki, and in the second, whiteness is not considered to be a hindrance to Harris.
A similar story is told through the comparison of Robert Dear, a white man who killed several people at a Planned Parenthood clinic, and Michael Brown, who was racially profiled and killed by police. Lipsitz argues that race is also omitted in these cases. Robert Dear’s rampage is portrayed as the work of a “gentle loner” without reference to the system of prejudice and entitlement enabled by the possessive investment of whiteness. Michael Brown is framed as “no angel” and the factor of racism is omitted from the story of his death.
By ignoring the history of inequality and oppression, these cases are presented as if the factor of whiteness were not at issue, even while the possessive investment of whiteness remains the primary factor determining the outcomes.
Chapter 4-7 Analysis
The figure of the violent white man is central to Lipsitz’s arguments in Chapters 4 and 6. Lipsitz views the patriotic imaginary in terms of Whiteness and Masculinity within “national narratives of male heroism and patriarchal protection” (82). Exploring whiteness through a gendered lens exemplifies the interdisciplinary elements of the text. Lipsitz creates a gritty portrait of white fragility in which he demonstrates that the possessive investment in whiteness is not a guarantor of happiness. He argues that when white people live desperate lives, they cling to whiteness more desperately.
Lipsitz explores the intersection of Neoliberalism and Race in this section when he examines fiscal policies in America. This is most clear when looking at political change in the Reagan era. He laments that instead of “a love for historical rights and responsibilities of the nation,” the new patriotism of the Reagan years was represented by “public spectacles of power and private celebrations of success” (89). Later, Lipsitz argues that “ignorance has costs” (111). This financial metaphor reinforces the arguments made throughout the text about the fact that whiteness leads to asset accumulation. Lipsitz argues that the possessive investment in whiteness is a force that flows through various forms of injustice and inequality. Lipsitz ties the wealth gap to the gap in terms of health care with the rhetorical device of repetition: “the racial health gap is paralleled by the racial wealth gap” (118). The repeated phrase functions on the rhyme of “health” and “wealth,” which reinforces the connection between asset accumulation and lived experience when it comes to racial inequality.
Denial is a key motif in this section, as Lipsitz explores the way whiteness denies history and denies itself. For example, to maintain the white versus Asian binary, the historical facts are left out of war films. Lipsitz emphasizes “denial” both in combat films and in public patriotic spectacle. Exploring media further, Lipsitz argues that in newspaper stories and television programs there are “racially specific” signs and symbols that encode human attributes from virtue to vice. For Lipsitz, the possessive investment in whiteness is encoded in these narratives.
He also presents McKinney’s research about denial. Lipsitz corroborates his thesis with layers of textual evidence in the sense that he references McKinney, whose informants are her students, who read an important article by McIntosh; he then cites James Baldwin in his assessment of this narrative, making yet another layer. This is corroboration through intertextuality.
In contrast with denial, Lipsitz explores the eruption of vengeance through the tales of sadistic killers. These stories highlight The Persistence of Racism in America. Lipsitz employs the rhetorical device of anaphora, which is a linguistic form of persistence, to dramatize the story of Dylan roof with a stylistic repetition: “The ‘country’ Dylan had in mind is not the constitutional democracy […] not the country of Anna Julia Cooper […] not the nation for which soldiers of all races bled and died in wars” (136). The anaphora is formed around the negative “not,” underscoring Dylan’s sense of disenfranchisement. He continues to use anaphora when he refers to the men who murdered people of color as “aberrations.” The point Lipsitz makes with the repetitively referring to them as aberrations is to call the exception into question. The portraits of all of these white men who took it upon themselves to “guard the borders of whiteness” follow a similar sadistic logic (124), exemplifying the text’s thematic idea that racism continues to endure in America instead of disappearing.
