[Below are pages 2-5 of George Lipsitz's newly released "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness," Temple Press. Lipsitz is also the author of the groundbreaking "Rainbow at Midnight," which also deals with the dialectic of race and class.]
Race is a cultural construct, but one with sinister structural causes and consequences. Conscious and deliberate actions have institutionalized group identity in the United States, not just through the dissemination of cultural stories, but also through systematic efforts from colonial times to the present to create economic advantages through a possessive investment in whiteness for European Americans. Studies of culture too far removed from studies of social structure leave us with inadequate explanations for understanding racism and inadequate remedies for combating it.
Desire for slave labor encouraged European settlers in North America to
view, first, Native Americans and, later, African Americans as racially
inferior people suited "by nature" for the humiliating subordination of
involuntary servitude. The long history of the possessive investment in
whiteness stems in no small measure from the fact that all subsequent
immigrants to North America have come to an already racialized society.
>From the start, European settlers in North America established structures
encouraging a possessive investment in whiteness. The colonial and early
national legal systems authorized attacks on Native Americans and
encouraged the appropriation of their lands. They legitimated racialized
chattel slavery, limited naturalized citizenship to "white" immigrants,
identified Asian immigrants as expressly unwelcome (through legislation
aimed at immigrants from China in 1882, from India in 1917, from Japan in
1924, and from the Philippines in 1934), and provided pretexts for
restricting the voting, exploiting the labor, and seizing the property of
Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans.
The possessive investment in whiteness is not a simple matter of black and white; all racialized minority groups have suffered from it, albeit to different degrees and in different ways. The African slave trade began in earnest only after large-scale Native American slavery proved impractical in North America. The abolition of slavery led to the importation of low-wage labor from Asia. Legislation banning immigration from Asia set the stage for the recruitment of low-labor from Mexico. The new racial categories that emerged in each of these eras all revolved around applying racial labels to "nonwhite" groups in or to stigmatize and exploit them while at the same time preserving the value of whiteness.
Although reproduced in new form in every era, the possessive investment whiteness has always been influenced by its origins in the racialized history of the United States--by its legacy of slavery and segregation, of "Indian" extermination and immigrant restriction, of conquest and colonialism. Although slavery has existed in many countries without any particular racial dimensions the slave system that emerged in North America soon took on distinctly forms. Africans enslaved in North America faced a racialized system of power that reserved permanent, hereditary, chattel slavery for black people. White settlers institutionalized a possessive investment in whiteness by making blackness synonymous with slavery and whiteness synonymous with freedom, also by pitting people of color against one another. Fearful of alliances between Native Americans and African Americans that might challenge the prerogatives of whiteness, white settlers prohibited slaves and free blacks from settling in "Indian country." European Americans used diplomacy and force to compel Native Americans to return runaway slaves to their white masters. During the Stono Rebellion of 1739, colonial authorities offered Native Americans a bounty for every rebellious slave they captured or killed. At the same British settlers recruited black slaves to fight against Native Americans in colonial militias. The power of whiteness depended not only on white hegemony over separate racialized groups, but also on manipulating racial outsiders to fight against one another, to compete with each other for white approval, and to seek the rewards and privileges of whiteness for themselves at the expense of other racialized populations.
Aggrieved communities of color have often curried favor with whites in or-to make gains at each other's expense. For example, in the nineteenth century some Native Americans held black slaves (in part to prove to whites that they could adopt "civilized" European American ways), and some of the first chartered African American units in the U.S. army went to war against Comanches in Texas or served as security forces for wagon trains of white settlers on the trails to California. The defeat of the Comanches in the 1870s sparked a mass migration by Spanish-speaking residents of New Mexico into the areas of West Texas formerly occupied by the vanquished Native Americans. Immigrants from Asia sought the rewards of whiteness for themselves by asking the courts to recognize them as "white" and therefore eligible for naturalized citizenship according to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1790; Mexican Americans also insisted on being classified as white. In the early twentieth century, black soldiers accustomed to fighting Native Americans in the Southwest participated in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines and the punitive expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico. Asian American managers cracked down on efforts by Mexican American farm workers to unionize, while the Pullman Company tried to break the African American Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters by importing Filipinos to work as porters. Mexican Americans and blacks took possession of some of the property confiscated from Japanese Americans during the internment of the 1940s, and Asian Americans, blacks, and Mexican Americans all secured advantages for themselves by cooperating with the exploitation of Native Americans.
Yet while all racialized minority groups have sometimes sought the rewards of whiteness, they have also been able to come together in interethnic antiracist alliances. Native American tribes often harbored runaway slaves and drew upon their expertise in combat against whites, as in 1711 when an African named Harry helped lead the Tuscaroras against the British. Native Americans secured the cooperation of black slaves in their attacks on the French settlement near Natchez in colonial Louisiana in 1729, and black Seminoles in Florida routinely recruited slaves from Georgia plantations to their side in battles against European Americans. African Americans resisting slavery and white supremacy in the United States during the nineteenth century sometimes looked to Mexico as a refuge (especially after that nation abolished slavery), and in the twentieth century the rise of Japan as a successful non-white world power often served as a source of inspiration and emulation among African American nationalists. Mexican American and Japanese American farm workers joined forces in Oxnard, California, in 1903 to wage a successful strike in the beet fields, and subsequently members of the two groups organized an interracial union, the Japanese Mexican Labor Association. Yet whether characterized by conflict or cooperation, all relations among aggrieved racialized minorities stemmed from recognition of the rewards of whiteness and the concomitant penalties imposed upon "nonwhite" populations.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)