How Racism Takes Place by George Lipsitz (review)

Despite the varying degrees of sophistication of its practitioners, whiteness studies has had trouble moving beyond the essential obviousness of its founding insight, which is that white people benefit from being white. However, in his new book, How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz uses this insight to generate well-argued considerations of how these benefits also systematically disadvantage blacks in practically all areas of American life. Using an eclectic but well-chosen range of subjects, Lipsitz extends the arguments of his groundbreaking The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics with a work that explores the ways in which racism is literally a grounded phenomenon, as much a “where” as it is a “how.” The book’s major failing, however, is that the racially skewed benefits Lipsitz rightfully indicts are presented as being more systematic than some readers may be willing to accept, and the cultural contestations with which he opposes them seem far from being up to the task.

Lipsitz’s primary argument in How Racism Takes Place is that “[l]argely because of racialized space, whiteness in this society is not so much a color as a condition. It is a structured advantage that channels unfair gains and unjust enrichments to whites while imposing unearned and unjust obligations in the way of Blacks” (3). After theoretical considerations of what he calls the “white spatial imaginary” and the “Black spatial imaginary,” he meticulously considers how spatial racism plays out in the areas of “sports and spectatorship,” the television series The Wire, the work of the artists Horace Tapscott, John Biggers, and Betye Saar, and in the discourses in and around Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play A Raisin in the Sun and Paule Marshall’s similarly “grounded” novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. Lipsitz closes with a consideration of the racial/spatial politics of post-Katrina New Orleans and a synoptic consideration of the general state of black America as a place to live and a place in which we might learn to live differently.

Although Lipsitz’s primary position cannot be considered new, his attempt to follow it across all of the spaces traversed by these topics and issues is original in striking ways. For a book so consistently invested in bearing bad news, How Racism Takes Place is surprisingly entertaining. In this book Lipsitz is, despite his apocalyptic leanings, essentially a raconteur. As in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, the strength of How Racism Takes Place is the thoroughness and flair with which he offers a critique that both encompasses and moves past the accusations of individual agency by “bad” people that have bedeviled attempts to recognize the structural specificity of American antiblack racism and the agency of both blacks and whites as “victims” and “villains.” Both books breathe scary new life into arguments that people have been making for years beyond the ken or the focused attention of the mainstream media.

Perhaps the most succinct articulation of Lipsitz’s position is that “racism takes place in the United States not because of the irredeemably racist character of whites as individuals, but because the racial project of whiteness is so useful to elites as a mechanism for preserving hierarchy, exploitation, and inequality in society at large” (42). Unfortunately, Lipsitz moves past the individualizing critiques that fail to adequately engage with “the racial project of whiteness” by moving all of the way to the other end of the spectrum. Like Alexander’s book, How Racism Takes Place achieves its effect by narratively spectacularizing information that had previously been presented primarily in the clinical language of the social sciences, where it could quietly suppurate beyond the sight and smell of the general reader. Lipsitz’s success in this enterprise make this book gripping reading by anyone interested in issues of racial discrimination and social justice.

There are, however, two limitations significant enough to seriously undermine the usefulness of How Racism Takes Place as social theory. The first is that, while Lipsitz offers a hardheaded investigation of the white...