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

Lipsitz examines the film Lean on Me (1989), which offers a racist portrayal of an inner-city high school as a place of chaos and bad behavior. John G. Avildsen directed the film (and also directed Rocky and The Karate Kid); it falls into a genre that Lipsitz calls “high school ‘disruption’ films” (184). The protagonist of the film is based on a Black American principal, Joe Clark, who was employed at a high school in Paterson, NJ. In an autobiographical note, Lipsitz remarks that he has a personal connection to the film because he went to that high school. His father was the principal of Eastside High. Lipsitz contrasts his father, who was a principled man who cared deeply for the students, with the real-life vigilante Joe Clark.

Clark became a prominent figure in the 1980s when effects of the cutting of social programs during the Reagan years were increasingly making life more difficult for Black Americans whose opportunities had steadily dwindled. Clark addressed the problems of the inner-city high school with an iron fist, which meant correcting the behavior of the student body without spending money to improve education. Lipsitz argues that Clark, who was popular among conservatives, fulfilled white fantasies by patrolling the halls with a baseball bat and a bullhorn in a sort of counterinsurgency and campaign of intimidation against the students.

Lipsitz describes the opening of Lean on Me as a montage that “portrays the predominantly Black students and staff of Eastside High School as lazy, licentious, boisterous, and brutal” (184). He likens the racist caricatures to minstrel shows of the 19th century and the D. W. Griffith’s ultra-racist film, Birth of a Nation (1915). The film, like Birth of a Nation, hails an “authoritarian patriarchal power” as an antidote to Black misbehavior “ranging from lascivious attacks on white women to the laziness of public employees” (184).

The fact that there is a movie based on Joe Clark and no films based on Black activists like “Septima Clark, the Reverend Buck Jones, Paul Robeson” or “Fannie Lou Hamer” attests to the passive investment in whiteness that is a subtext for major motion pictures (186). Lipsitz contends that Hollywood assumes that white audiences have no interest in seeing Black people with agency, acting in their own interests, and caring for their communities. Black Americans appear in film primarily as “sidekicks and underlings” (186). For Lipsitz, an exemplary example of Black passivity is the portrayal of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi Burning in which Black people play the role of the passive spectator. “From Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind, from Lean on Me to Driving Miss Daisy,” Lipsitz argues, “Hollywood has always preferred its faithful Black servants” (187). The figure of Joe Clark proves that “not all white supremacists are white” (189) and that people from all backgrounds can work for the passive investment in whiteness.

Clark fulfilled the role of the tough and determined male hero who would bully the students into submission, as does the protagonist in Lean on Me. Both the film and the historical figure of the principal ignored the structural problems in the broken educational system brought on by economic decline and the uneven funding of schools. A fairy tale was constructed in which these problems could be solved by a strong hero who would bully his way to a properly disciplined student body.

Lipsitz argues that Lean on Me gave white audiences the opportunity to blame the disenfranchised victim. Instead of examining the systemic disenfranchisement of Black communities, the social problems were blamed on the underdeveloped character of inner-city Black people. The remedy of strict discipline fit the simplistic diagnosis of complicated social issues, and this firm response as exemplified in the tough male hero alleviated whites from recognizing structural economic injustice.

The figure of the vigilante principal, for Lipsitz, symbolizes the real vigilante mentality that is rife in the 21st century. Lipsitz argues that aggressive policing is as violent as the crimes that the police purport to address. The vigilante approach in policing elevates the criminal mentality, which then functions as social policy. Lipsitz argues that these policies are grounded in grievance and fear. He claims that this mood of resentment is exploited by both film makers and law-and-order politicians, and the possessive investment in whiteness is masked by these action stories of vigilante justice.

Lipsitz observes that there is no essence that automatically unites the victims of white supremacy according to some common endeavor. Historically there has been a tendency for people of color to seek the benefits of whiteness to the detriment of other minoritized people as both groups compete for resources. But the polylateral relations among aggrieved people of color can produce unpredictable effects and unexpected alliances, as occurred in the 1940s with regards to Asian nationalism and African American liberation. Even before the Second World War, Booker T. Washington considered Japanese nationalism as a possible model for developing Black American opportunities in the US.

Lipsitz draws upon the stories of two historical figures, Malcolm X and the Black American historian John Hope Franklin, as oppositional narratives that reveal some of the “explosive racial contradictions” in the US during the Second World War (201). While the situations of these gentlemen were different, the way they emerged in the postwar period were aligned: Malcolm X became a Black nationalist leader and John Hope Franklin embarked “on a lifetime of oppositional intellectual work and activism” (202).

Figures such as Malcolm X recognized the racialized nature of the Second World War and contemplated white supremacy and the limitations of democracy. He also considered the possibilities of coordination with non-white nations around the world. Malcolm X avoided the military draft during the Second World War with a ruse: He feigned an ardent desire to join the Japanese army during his military entrance examinations. His plan was successful, and he was deemed mentally unfit for military service. Lipsitz again uses the figure of the trickster “as embedded in Black folklore” to describe Malcolm X, who used “guile and deception to fool foes and achieve ends covertly” (202). After the war, Malcolm X worked to connect the anti-imperialist struggles globally with the antiracist movement in the United States. Connecting the experiences of Black people with Asians and Asian American complicated the racial binary of Black and white. The result was that minoritized people in the US could begin to envision their minoritization in terms of the majority of non-white peoples across the globe. In other words, by considering these families of resemblance, the historical and social nature of race formation reconfigured race relations in the US.

John Hope Franklin inadvertently avoided serving in the military but through a different set of circumstances. He was eager to join. However, the navy rejected him because he lacked the credential of whiteness, so he applied at the Department of War, but they declined to hire him as well. When he went to a physical, the white doctor wouldn’t even let him in the office. Lipsitz contends that when the military eventually asked Black American, Mexican American, Asian American, and Indigenous American soldiers to fight for freedom overseas, it became painfully apparent that they didn’t enjoy these very freedoms in the US. The most important legacy of World War II, for Lipsitz, was the burgeoning interethnic solidarity among groups who suffered under white supremacy. The war in the Pacific reinforced a new sense of militancy, especially for African Americans. The postwar era, in Lipsitz’s terms, “served as a crucible for antiracist thought and action” (217).

Black soldiers in the Korean War noticed how Japanese and Korean people didn’t exhibit conspicuously racist behavior, which seemed to suggest that white supremacy was a phenomenon most pronounced in the United States. In the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali refused to fight because he said that he had no quarrel with the Vietnamese. His celebrated case helped publicize the antiwar movement.