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

Lipsitz remarks that, in the years following the Second World War, a journalist asked Richard Wright about the “Negro problem” in the United States (1). Wright answered that there wasn’t a “Negro problem” but instead there was a “white problem” (1). Through this reference, Lipsitz demonstrates how whiteness is everywhere in America though it is sometimes hard to see, even when it functions as an organizing principle in social relations. The possessive investment in whiteness surreptitiously frames much of private and public life. Although race is a cultural concept, it intersects with structures that promote economic advantages for white Americans since Europeans first settled in North America.

That whiteness is so pervasive that it seems to disappear into the background is one of the primary attributes of the possessive investment in whiteness. As another point of reference, Lipsitz quotes the English academic, Richard Dyer, who claims that “white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular” (1). Dyer reaffirms, for Lipsitz, the positioning of whiteness as an unobserved category “against which difference is constructed” (1). Just as the identification of “American” as “white American” to the exclusion of people of color, whiteness in the current

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