Book Review

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. By George Lipsitz. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. xxii, 274 pp. Cloth, $59.95, isbn 1-56639-634-4. Paper, $19.95, isbn 1-56639-635-2.)

American historians continue to reap the wages of whiteness. What looked like a passing fad has mushroomed into one of the most productive fields in American historical and cultural studies. Since the pioneering work of W. E. B. Du Bois, whiteness studies have combined an analytical and a polemical dimension, as do these two books. Concerned to expand the subfield from its roots in labor history, both studies focus primarily on cultural production in explaining the historical development and social consequences of white identity in the United States.	1
Drawing on a mountain of diverse cultural artifacts, Whiteness of a Different Color traces the "vicissitudes of whiteness" over two centuries among "probationary whites," that is, non-wasp (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) European Americans. Race is as important for understanding the history of European immigrants as for understanding the history of nonwhites, Matthew Frye Jacobson claims. His book demolishes the commonsense view of contemporary historians that when earlier generations referred to the "Hebrew race" or the "Celtic race," they really meant ethnicity. Not so, Jacobson shows; they really meant race.	2
But precisely what Americans meant by race, and how they interpreted the physiognomies of those who appeared racially different, was subject to enormous historical change. Jacobson constructs his book in three sections: race understood as a historically contingent concept, as a byproduct of sense perception, and as the consequence of concrete struggles for power in law courts and as part of national imperialist policies. These conceptual underpinnings, though useful, buckle under the weight of evidence and interpretive energy Jacobson pours into his study. His most useful contribution is advancing a new periodization of whiteness since the early republic.	3
Following the 1790 Naturalization Act, whiteness was a relatively undifferentiated category denoting fitness for self-government. Beginning in the 1840s, in response to burgeoning immigration, this fairly cavalier consensus was displaced by a new taxonomy of hierarchically arranged and distinct "white races": Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, Latins, and Anglo-Saxons, among others. Around the time of the Immigration Act of 1924 this taxonomy was consolidated into the scientifically authorized category Caucasian. By the middle of this century, a plethora of races had been reduced in the public mind to just two, and discourse on race was largely reduced to the "Negro question."	4
Jacobson interrupts his narrative with a kind of freeze-frame on 1877, when the fluidity of racial discourse played out dramatically among various populations in different regions of the United States; it is followed by a searching investigation of the historical instability of racial Jewishness. His conclusion, a measured debunking of the 1970s white "ethnic revival," identifies the provocation that animates George Lipsitz's collection of articles. Unpacking with brutal clarity the privileges attendant upon white identity in America, Lipsitz provides a withering reply to whites, ethnic or otherwise, who would claim a history of oppression in the United States comparable to that suffered by racialized minorities. His main focus is on twentieth-century Caucasian-style whiteness, though he occasionally pauses to sketch a longer history. Beginning the book with Ross Barnett's Mississippi and ending with Pete Wilson's California, Lipsitz does not take a progressive view of racial uplift. "The amount of suffering and strife engendered by California's leaders today is greater in both quantity and quality than anything Mississippi's white supremacists did to their citizens thirty years ago," he asserts.	. . .