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

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, MA, just a few years after the end of the Civil War. After growing up in a mostly white town, he attended Fisk University in Nashville, TN and for the first time encountered Jim Crow laws. His analysis of American racism began with this experience. Du Bois studied abroad at the University of Berlin and went to Harvard and became first African American to receive a PhD from the university in 1895. Du Bois rose to prominence when he publicly criticized Booker T. Washington’s speech, “The Atlantic Compromise,” in which he argued that Black people would benefit more from vocational education than they would from higher education. Du Bois took issue with the fact that Washington did not stand up for the equal rights that were granted in the 14th Amendment.

He is the most prominent anti-racist activist in the first part of the 20th century. The collection of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark in African American literature. In 1935, Du Bois published a history of the Reconstruction era titled Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, in which he theorizes about the wages of whiteness, which is foundational for Lipsitz book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. The influences of Du Bois on American social science is significant, especially his theory of double consciousness. This is the idea that Black people see themselves both through the lens of white America and through their own eyes. Double consciousness is the result of two systems of cultural consciousness, the (white) American and the African American, in a single mind. Double consciousness comes with the traumatic recognition that when one is looking at one’s self through the eyes of white America, white America looks on with casual contempt.

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois gives his account of compensatory whiteness in the social order created in the late 19th century based on racial subordination in a capitalist system. He argues that poor white laborers, even though they received a pittance of a wage, were afforded compensation by the very fact that they were not Black. In Du Bois’s terms, they “were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage” (Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860—1880. Meridian Books, 1964, p. 700). They could vote, participate in public functions, frequent public parks, and attend good schools. Du Bois writes that “police were drawn from their ranks” and the courts treated them so leniently “as to encourage lawlessness” (Ibid., p. 700). In addition to the solidification of a psychology of caste, which was reinforced by the denial of titles of courtesy and the expected gestures of servility, there was a metaphorical compensation that seemed to align the white laborer with their bosses. Thus, even while white laborers were exploited in a capitalist system, the slim compensation of whiteness kept them from forming political coalitions with other similarly destitute people of color.

Lipsitz references this compensatory effect in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness in his account of competition between white and Black laborers and the fact that employers could keep wages low for whites by threatening to turn to cheaper Black labor. Lipsitz also adopts Du Bois’s conceit of the public and psychological wage by arguing that the benefit of whiteness actually becomes an economic asset. The investment in whiteness corresponds to the advantages of wealth accumulation through familial lineages. Du Bois’s critique of the capitalist system coincided with his analysis of class, and the intersectionality of class and race is another prominent feature of Lipsitz’s work.