Possessive Investment in Whiteness

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Possessive Investment in Whiteness

• Lecture 4
• Beyond the Binaries
• COM 490
• Professor Ralina Joseph

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Terms for the day

• Possessive investment in whiteness
• Liberal social democratic reforms

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Whiteness Studies

• Relatively new, interdisciplinary academic field
• About white privilege and how concept of
  whiteness invented
• Why always look to people of color when talking
  about race (puts the problem of racism on
  pocs).
• How whiteness was created and re-defined in
  history, economy, politics, culture, etc.
• Anti-racist academic field not about
  celebrating white identity but about unpacking
  white supremacy
• Long tradition w/ more contemporary scholarship
  by novelist Toni Morrison, historian David
  Roediger, film scholar Richard Dyer, educator
  Christine Sleeter, and many others.

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Critique of Whiteness Studies

• Whiteness studies scholars are pointing out what
  people of color have been saying forever, but
  since the information is coming from white people
  its just now being heard (like how rap becomes
  so much more popular when it comes out of
  Eminems mouth).
• The acclaim white studies has gotten ironically
  underscores white privilege, even in the realm of
  studying about race and gender.

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Screening

• Race The Power of an Illusion, Part 3

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Possessive Investment

• Define possessive
• Ramifications of possessiveness
• Significance of title

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Reading Questions

• How does Lipsitz characterize whiteness?
• According to Lipsitz, how do European Americans
  create a white identity?
• What factors institutionalized a possessive
  investment in whiteness?
• Is the possessive investment in whiteness just a
  Black/white issue? Why or why not?
• Give examples of federal policies that helped
  ratify white inclusion.
• Provide examples of environmental racism.
• Explain how even seemingly race-neutral policies
  supported by both neoconservatives and social
  democrats in the 1980s and 1990s have also
  increased the absolute value of being white.
• What are some of the reasons Lipsitz provides for
  recent Black economic decline? Explain.
• What is the gap between white perceptions and
  minority experiences and why does Lipsitz
  suggest that this exists?
• How does Lipsitz say that white people can become
  a part of the solution? Explain.

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Lipsitzs Argument

• Liberal social democratic reforms of the 20th
  century actually worked against people of color
  and to create and foster this thing called
  possessive investment in whiteness.
• This form of racism is not like Jim Crow, de jure
  segregation, but that doesnt mean that its not
  racism.
• Like many whiteness studies scholars, Lipsitz
  points out that the nature of whiteness and white
  power is particularly insidious because of the
  allegedly nothing quality that it has
• Quote p. 369 As the unmarked category against
  which difference is constructed, whiteness never
  has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge
  its role as an organizing principle in social and
  cultural relations.
• In order to understand our present moment (Walter
  Benjamins presence of mind), you have to
  understand whiteness.

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How was possessive investment in whiteness
created?

• Various macro-level factors (i.e., THE RACIAL
  STATE) helped different Europeans learn how to
  identify as white. These include New Deal era
  Wagner Act and Social Security Act, the Federal
  Housing Act of 1934, urban renewal, suburban
  developments.
• Other examples from article?
• AND yet, according to Lipsitz, how have white
  people responded to such acts?

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Solution

• Quote p. 384 Those of us who are white can
  only become part of the solution if we recognize
  the degree to which we are already part of the
  problem not because of our race, but because of
  our possessive investment in it.
• This problem of possessive investment cant
  necessarily be solved, but an explicitly
  antiracist pan-ethnic movement that acknowledges
  the existence and power of whiteness might make
  some important changes. He stresses the
  importance of efforts by whites to fight racism,
  not out of sympathy for someone else but out of a
  sense of self-respect and simple justice.
• Thoughts?