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

Lipsitz analyzes the relationship between neoliberalism and race and argues that neoliberalism perpetuates racism as a matter of policy. The neoliberal drive to privatize public space is promoted with racialized metaphors. Lipsitz argues that the racist, anti-immigrant movement is a consequence of neoliberal policies put in place years previously, but immigrants of color are blamed for the failures of neoliberalism. By examining neoliberalism as an ideological concept, Lipsitz demonstrates how the effects of neoliberal policies are often overlooked or considered the natural character of capitalist competition. Lipsitz advocates for a critique of the relationship between neoliberalism and race to expose and dispel the tendency to blame aggrieved groups rather than the larger and more complicated structure of neoliberal society.

Neoliberalism is an ideology in which competition, rather than cooperation, is the essential feature of human relations. Neoliberal policies prioritize individualistic self-interest over the value of the common good and public spaces. The tendency of neoliberal policy is to privatize these public spaces, especially spaces available to people of color. Lipsitz writes that the “core contradiction of neoliberal society is race” (xxvii). Race is deployed as a means of devaluing public spaces and institutions by portraying them as unclean and dangerous.