The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition Book

In the first century AD, the Greek astronomer Ptolemy devised an ingenious mathematical model for predicting planetary movements that was so remarkably accurate that its underlying assumptions became axioms of astronomical science for over a millennium. His status as the supreme master of Western astronomy ended only after Copernicus demolished the cornerstone of Ptolemy's theoretical edifice by demonstrating that that the Earth was not, as Ptolemy had assumed, the center of the solar system and that the planets did not, as Ptolemy had insisted, dance courses of obediently orbiting pirouettes around our planet. Ptolemy's model is a metaphor for the allure of self-aggrandizing theory and the extent to which even the most absurd nonsense can appear reasonable when it becomes inextricably and yet erroneously linked to a body of undeniable truths.

Which leads me to George Lipsitz's "Possessive Investment in Whiteness" - self-aggrandizing nonsense that takes on a sheen of reasonableness by virtue of it being brought into close proximity to a body of undeniable truths. Lipsitz's basic approach to explaining black disadvantage is to recount the litany of means by which African American's have been systemically short-changed within American society and, at the end of each uncontestably rotten thing done to them, state as a fact that the reason for this abuse is attributable to white American's "possessive investment in whiteness". Residential segregation resulting from the manipulation of real estate markets and the race conscious channeling of federal loan support available through the FHA and other government agencies towards white Americans and away from otherwise qualified black Americans - possessive investment in whiteness. Indifferent regard for environmental safeguards, concentration of toxic waste storage and the weak remediation efforts made in black communities - possessive investment in whiteness. Appallingly poor educational infrastructure made available to black children - possessive investment in whiteness. Limitations on career opportunities due to globalization, systems of mass incarceration designed to round up young black men and make them into felons, regressive taxes in the form of fees and fines visited disproportionately on black citizens living in segregated communities of color - each, the possessive investment in whiteness.

This possessive investment in whiteness sounds like a pretty awful thing. Someone should get after that….y'know…..put a stop to it. The trouble is, of course, that because Lipsitz doesn't quite go so far as actually explain precisely what this possessive investment in whiteness is or how it actually works, one is left, after finishing his book, at a loss for practical answers. Oh, to be sure, he explains with exceptional clarity and fidelity to the truth the litany of horrible things that have been, and continue to be done to blacks within American society; yet to correctly identify an effect is not the same thing as explaining that effect's cause. By consistently linking a true effect to a posited cause without actually explaining the nature of that cause and the means by which it supposedly actuates its obnoxious effect, what he in essence does is engage in argument by the "if it walks like a duck" variety of self-aggrandizing innuendo.

The crazy thing is that he could, of course, be correct; after all, if it walks like a duck, maybe it is a duck. My point is, however, that without presenting a fully fleshed out explanation of what this possessive investment is and how it works - one that is vetted through, among other means, a thorough analysis of all of its inevitable consequences if it should, indeed, be true as well as an honest consideration of at least superficially plausible alternative explanations - the incessantly quacking creature that we both see hissing at small children as it waddles down the street is as likely to be a duck as it is my loud and very unpleasant Aunt Loraine, right? If Lipsitz is going to set about positing theories of why things are as they are, he is (if he is to be believed) obliged to explain why his theory is correct and competing alternative theories are not. This, regrettably, maddeningly, he categorically fails to do.

With this said, there is much about Lipsitz's book that is worthwhile. In particular, he truly does a masterful job of cataloging and explaining the litany of awful things that are routinely done to communities of color. The enduring error of our time is that the bad sociological outcomes that are disproportionately visited upon American blacks are the result of black cultural pathologies and not the product of actual harmful things that have been routinely done to the members of those communities over the course of multiple generations. Lipsitz's well explained catalog put the lie to this obnoxious fiction.

Sadly, his rejoinder to specious claims of pervasive black cultural pathologies is an equally specious claim of pervasive white racial mendacity. Like the appearance of certain planets at certain places at certain times in the nighttime sky, the things that have been done to American communities of color over the course of generations are immutable, undeniable truths which must be acknowledged and thoroughly understood. Yet like Ptolemy, Lipsitz has linked undeniable truths to self-aggrandizing nonsense in a way that obscures, rather than illuminates, paths to true and meaningful progress. The truths are worth knowing, yet Lipsitz leaves it to others to make sense of them in any way that is helpful.