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

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and racist brutality and murder.

The preface begins with an epigraph, which is a quote by James Baldwin: “I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason” (vii).

Lipsitz argues that the “possessive investment in whiteness” is a product of private prejudice and public policy that reinforces the racial hierarchy in society (viii). The “cash value” of whiteness accumulates through the advantages of discriminatory housing markets, unfavorable educational opportunities, and the inheritance of intergenerational wealth. The resources and opportunities available to white Americans are an incentive to maintain this access by continuing to invest in whiteness. For Lipsitz, even though whiteness is a delusion or fiction in the sense that the idea of racial identity is a social construct that has no scientific basis, the material consequences in terms of the distribution of wealth, power, and prestige are self-evident. The adjective “possessive” denotes the relationship between whiteness and the accumulation of assets. Lipsitz maintains that white supremacy persists through indirect means as a system that protects white privileges while denying such access to communities of color.