By George Lipsitz
During this unflinching examine white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is an issue of pursuits in addition to attitudes, an issue of estate in addition to pigment. Above and past own emotions and acts of person prejudice, whiteness is a dependent virtue that produced unfair profits and unearned rewards for whites whereas implementing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and well-being deal with contributors of aggrieved racial teams. achieving past the black/white binary, Lipsitz indicates how whiteness works in recognize to Asian american citizens, Latinos, and local americans. Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights legislation, the racialised dimensions of financial restructuring and deindustrialization, and the consequences of environmental racism, activity discrimination, and college segregation. He additionally analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. tradition, the racial appeals encoded inside patriotic nationalism, commercialized rest, and political ads. maybe most vital, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded within the paintings and politics of the novel black culture. This revised and multiplied version comprises an essay in regards to the effect of typhoon Katrina on operating type Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual fight for dignity and self decision has been obscured by way of the city's photograph as a vacationer celebration city.
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Additional info for The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Revised and Expanded Edition)
Sample text
Most white families have acquired their net worth from the appreciation of property that they secured under conditions of special privilege in a discriminatory housing market. In their prize-winning book Black Wealth/White Wealth, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro demonstrate how the history of housing discrimination gives white parents special advantages to borrow funds for their children’s college education or to loan money to their children to enter the housing market. In addition, much discrimination in home lending is not based on considerations of net worth; it stems from decisions made by white banking officials based on their stereotypes about minority communities.
3 Most of the time violence was not needed to preserve segregation because restrictive covenants achieved that end through peaceful although still coercive means. As private agreements written into deed restrictions on the resale of property, restrictive covenants satisfied the courts and effectively constricted the housing market for groups subject to discrimination, while providing an artificially inflated equity for whites. African American community organizations took the lead in opposing restrictive covenants in the courts, attaining partial success in 1948 when the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v.
Collective exercises of power that relentlessly channel rewards, resources, and opportunities from one group to another will not appear “racist” from this perspective, because they rarely announce their intention to discriminate against individuals. Yet they nonetheless give racial identities their sinister social meaning by giving people from different races vastly different life chances. The gap between white perception and minority experience can have explosive consequences. Little more than a year after the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, a sixteen-year-old high school junior shared her opinions with a reporter from the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t think white people owe anything to black people,” she explained.