Book Review

Canada and the United States

Hank Aaron once made the elegant observation that, although most white Americans will concede that some black ballplayers in the age of segregation were "good enough" to have cracked the major leagues, few ever reflect upon the benefits that the color bar bestowed upon those white players who never had to face the Jackie Robinsons, the Bob Gibsons, or the Willie Mayses of their generation. How much did Babe Ruth owe to segregation's artificial narrowing of the competitive field? And what of those white players whose talents were merely middling or marginal? George Lipsitz's book represents Aaron's insight writ large. Traversing a remarkably broad terrain of American social, political, and cultural history from the colonial period to present, Lipsitz interrogates whiteness as an idiom of privilege and gain—a shared "investment" whose dividends for generations have accrued to white liberals and white reactionaries alike. Discrimination, we too easily overlook, means profit just as surely as it means loss: "minority disadvantages craft advantages for others"; "whiteness has cash value" (pp. vii, 12).

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Over the latter half of the twentieth century, critical work on racism in the United States has steadily shifted from the individualized, bigotry-and-prejudice model favored by writers like Gunnar Myrdal in the 1940s, through a more systemic analysis of "institutionalized racism" in the 1960s, to a view of "race" itself as a socially constructed articulation of power in the 1990s: a mutable set of conceptions and perceptions at once shaped by, and expressive of, patterns of dominance and resistance within the culture at large. Lipsitz's book both consolidates and advances this last turn in the scholarship.

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