How Racism Takes Place By George Lipsitz Temple University Press. 2008. 310 pages. $27.95

Abstract

In his book, Lipsitz reminds scholars how fundamental white privilege to our society and how white privilege works. In his previous book, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, he focuses on the disadvantages of African Americans, which, he argues, deflects attention away from the advantages of whites. However, in How Racism Takes Place he covers an array of topics, which include “the white spatial imaginary.” Lipsitz “explores the white spatial imaginary to explain how and why the racially propelled logic of hostile privatism and defensive localism has come to dominate decisions about both private investment and public policy.”(13) He then turns his attention to “black spatial imaginary that counters” the white spatial imaginary in black communities. In Chapter 1, Lipsitz debunks the notion that African Americans who moved to the North were welcomed in white spaces. Lipsitz mentions how, like in the South, whites in the North freely attacked African Americans knowing white authorities would not prosecute. Lipsitz describes several incidents in Northern cities. For example, in 1949, 30 black children were bombarded with baseball bats, knives, and lead pipes at the hands of hundreds of whites that didn't want them in a desegregated pool in St. Louis. In Chicago's Trumball Park in 1953, white violence erupted and intimidated the housing authority from placing new housing projects in white neighborhoods. In Michigan in 1971 whites used dynamite to blow up school buses to prevent desegregation. Historically, scholars have written about the problems of desegregation in the South. However, Lipsitz sheds an important light on the problems African Americans had integrating into historically white spaces. Lipsitz references the “white amnesia” that plagues the acknowledgements of white privilege that everyday whites have enjoyed in this country, which has led to unjust white enrichment and unjust black impoverishment. Lipsitz states, “The white spatial imaginary has cultural as well as social consequences.”(29) Lipsitz states, “Whites generally endorse the spatial arrangements that provide them with unfair gains and unjust enrichments.”(34)