How long does it take to read Possessive Investment in Whiteness?
George Lipsitz
Possessive Investment in Whiteness by George Lipsitz takes about 5 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 11 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1998. 283 pages, about 77,825 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 39 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 15 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town.
Subjects: Race relations, Race identity, Whites, Social policy, Racism, Prejudices
