How Racism Takes Place

by George Lipsitz

Argues that racism continues to the present day due to practices that force different racial groups into specific areas, where such commodities as education, transportation, and jobs are unevenly distributed to the residents based on the area.

Genres: Race, History, Anti Racist, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Cultural

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is pretty dry and academic, but it's super important. The first half was much more interesting than the second. Lipsitz shows how racial segregation is interwoven into a lot of the American divide on race. The most interesting chapter for me was his analysis of the wire (which I never watched), but I thought Lipsitz' argument was convincing. The chapters felt disjoined too, but each was interesting.

[Andrea]

This is both a great description of the effects of racism on space and of some innovative and important efforts to reimagine and take power on a small scale within space.

That said, it doesn't really get beyond the descriptive. It calls on a wide array of theorists to support the argument but strips them of their own radical calls for overturning the system. Thus we have Michelle Alexander on incarceration without her arguments about caste, Ruth Gilmore without her political economy of prisons, Logan and Moloch without their theory of the capitalist growth machine based on Marxists Smith and Harvey, Cedric Robinson without his Black Marxism and Raymond Williams without his white working-class Marxism, Ture and Hamilton without Black Power. I'm not big on single unifying theories that explain all, but reading this made me feel the importance of exposing underlying mechanisms, theorising causes and working towards a real solution that actually grapples with power and struggle and how real concrete change occurs. I love writing and art and reclaiming spaces and finding self-affirming power in our daily lives and communities but is that sufficient to overcome centuries of injustice inscribed in the land and urban fabric itself? No. Necessary but not sufficient.

There is so much good radical work that this isn't in conversation with--the construction of race and whiteness, racial hierarchies, the meaning of racism itself, the cobbling together of hegemony, radial understandings of socio-spatial dynamics. I feel that whiteness is essentialised as a privileged suburban experience. While I agree that there is undoubtedly a dominant white spatial imaginary tied to suburban experience and privilege, and that this is part of the problem, I don't find it useful to posit it without exposing its chinks and gaps and recognising the ways that this is itself an ideal construction far from the experience of many. To create a duality between white and Black I find even less useful given America's rich diversity of tradition and struggle and the rich veins of work on intersectionality.

Thus I fully agree with the problems as he describes them, and the importance of drawing of histories and experiences of struggle, but not particularly the way he does so.

How Racism Takes Place argues for the importance of acknowledging the degree to which our society is structured by a white spatial imaginary and for confronting the serious moral, political and social challenges mounted against it by a black spatial imaginary. The white spatial imaginary portrays the properly gendered prosperous suburban home as the privileged moral geography of the nation. Widespread, costly, and often counterproductive practices of surveillance, regulation, and incarceration become justified as forms of frontier defense against demonized people of color. Works of popular film and fiction often revolve around phobic representations of Black people unfit for freedom. These cultural commitments have political consequences. They emerge from public policies that place the acquisitive consumer at the center of the social world, that promote hostile privatism and defensive localism as suburban structures of feeling. they encourage homeowners to band together to capture amenities and advantages for themselves while outsourcing responsibilities and burdens to less powerful communities. [13]

He also has a rather folksy prescription for 'changing the scale, scope, and stakes of space--burrowing in, building up, and branching out' [20]. I hate it when academics fail to recognise the amazing things people do to survive a terrible world with souls intact, at the same time I think it is a failure of theory to imagine that these can change anything without a strong and sustained movement in struggle. He writes 'Ending the fatal links that connect place and race would do much for social justice', but I cannot find the answers to breaking them here. He writes

This requires a two-part strategy that entails a frontal attack on all the mechanisms that prevent people of color from equal opportunities to accumulate assets that appreciate in value and can be passed down across generations, as well as a concomitant embrace of the Black spatial imaginary based on privileging use value over exchange value, sociality over selfishness, and inclusion over exclusion. [61]

But I think the answers to ending these links lie in the way that racism and capitalism have been born and grown together and we cannot unpick one with unpicking both. Almost all of the theory he draws on tries to address this, yet he doesn't really. How do you engage in a massive redistribution of wealth without some serious changes in the economic system, and is that not what the white spatial imaginary has been constructed to prevent? Is it useful to claim a privileging of use value as a Black imaginary, isn't its power that it is shared by a wide variety of imaginaries rooted in struggles for justice? I feel like we're back to winning a piece of the pie without challenging the pie itself, in a world facing global injustices on a massive scale and environmental annihilation, we need more.


A few other statements I think are interesting

'The white spatial imaginary has cultural as well as a social consequences. It structures feelings as well as social institutions. the white spatial imaginary idealizes 'pure' and homogenous spaces, controlled environments, and predictable patterns of design and behaviour. It seeks to hide social problems rather than solve them'. [29]

How I long for dialectics when I read this, surely all of these things act upon each other--how is this imaginary formed, reformed, reinforced, reimagined? He also writes 'The white spatial imaginary views space as a locus for the generation of exchange value' [30], but that 'Preferences for private dwellings, private developments, and privatization of municipal services may appear to be market choices, but in reality they reflect the coordinated manipulation of market forces by wealthy corporations and their allies in government' [31]. So how does that work, and how do they get people to buy in and continue buying in.

What this book does, as his earlier Investment in Whiteness does, is stand as a descriptive synthesis of what we know, bridging political, economic and cultural strands of work. To get a broad sense of how things work and where deeper more theoretical work can be found to get closer to causes and closer to solutions, this is good. To end with a great quote from Amiri Baraka, stating that the enduring power of Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun lies in how it states the central problems Black people in America face every day:

the powerlessness of black people to control their own fat or that of their families in capitalist America where race is place, white is right, and money makes and defines the man. (quoted from 'A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun's Enduring Passion')

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually read only about half of this book; the second half started to get a little tedious. But the first half was electrifying. Two chapters in particular really grabbed me: one an analysis of the St. Louis Rams as an example of how "subsidies for professional sports teams and other corporations do not 'trickle down' to the majority of the population, but instead function largely as a means for transferring wealth and resources from the poor and the middle class to the rich"; the other a detailed appreciation of the accomplishments of the HBO series The Wire along with a devastating critique of the show's failure to represent the system of exploitation and racism that created the Baltimore ghetto that provides the setting for much of the show:

Without a systemic analysis of how housing discrimination creates the ghetto, The Wire is left with the default positions inscribed in the white spatial imaginary: that people who have problems are problems, that social welfare programs produce only "poverty pimps" and hustlers who take advantage of the poor, and that social disintegration has gone so far it simply cannot be stopped. These values "hail" certain kinds of viewers: knowing cynics who enjoy having their worst fears confirmed, passive voyeurs who think of themselves as noble because they feel sorry for others from the safety of their living rooms, and self-satisfied suburbanites who use portrayals of Black criminality to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the inequalities that provide them with unfair gains and unjust enrichments.

Back when I watched The Wire, I did a lot of writing on my blog about the show. Especially in this post, I struggled with the issues that Lipsitz writes about, and I yearned for some type of analysis to identify what I felt was missing in the show. Lipsitz satisfyingly provides that analysis.

[Vel Veeter]

Some other reviews make the claim that this is the book that everyone should read if they care about anti-racism. And I think this is about half-true. More than anything, those people need to read a lot of George Lipsitz and especially his book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness because that's the book that really explains in detail what you need to know about how this country created the very structures of society through whiteness.

This book relies on that understanding to explore its question. The title of this book is a double-entendre. Specifically, it's about how racism embodies spaces and how spaces are built with full entanglement in spaces. He refers a few times to the "racialization of space" and the "spacialization of race" and thinking through the ways these two inverse idea/processes work really help to make this book. In the last year or so we've thought more about both elements. How protests made of mostly white people are not deemed dangerous or how there are "good" and "bad" neighborhoods etc etc .

The reason I say that this book is not for everyone interested in the topic is because the last part of the book where he looks are sites of resistance gets a little wonky, in terms of cultural studies and theory, whereas the opening several section are more clear explorations of concrete situations.

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book that explores the nature of segregation even after Civil Right legislation has pasted by the continuation of White supremacy as we get lax enforcement of laws and court decisions that continue to pay deference to the desires of White people.
The books also explores how the Black community, often working in restricted spaces challenges barriers and brings forth a different value and ethic that found in the White community. An engaging books that raises many questions about neoliberal thinking and also the bias in policies that few people even question today.

[Connie Combs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapters 1 - 4 are essential! the other chapters are most relevant for those interested in cultural expression of blacks under oppression

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 | Great book but I got the main point in less than the first half

[Milton Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining and informative. George Lipsitz always brings his "A" game!