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

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Review

This year, I am recommending only one book--George Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Temple University Press, 1998). Lipsitz is best known for showing how popular culture and the changing fortunes of the working class and people of color transformed the United States after World War II. This new book brings together his fierce passion for racial justice with his talent for cultural analysis.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is meant to grab white people by the lapels and shake them out of their complacency about all of the myriad, interlocking, and sometimes subtle ways that white privilege is achieved and protected. A major theme of the book is that "whiteness has a cash value." Through banking practices, educational arrangements, the criminal justice system, and media representations, whites--whether consciously or not--are able to "pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations."

Lipsitz is especially compelling when he analyzes how seemingly race-neutral policies in the United States preserve race privilege. He reminds us that the Social Security Act excluded domestic and farm workers--a majority of them people of color--from benefits. The Federal Housing Act of 1934, touted as making home ownership possible for millions, created a federal housing agency that channeled almost all of the loan money toward whites and away from communities of color. The urban renewal and federal highway projects of the 1950s and 1960s "devastated minority neighborhoods," he argues. "More than 60 percent of those displaced by urban renewal were African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, or members of other minority racial groups."

Today in Houston, 75 percent of the city's garbage incinerators and all of its garbage dumps are located in black neighborhoods. Around the country, Lipsitz informs us, "60 percent of African Americans and Latinos live in communities...