George Lipsitz

Attacking the common view that whiteness is a meaningless category of identity, Lipsitz shows that public policy and private prejudice insure that whites wind up on top of the social hierarchy. Passionately and clearly written, this wide-ranging book probes into the social and material rewards that accrue to "the possessive investment in whiteness." Lipsitz sums up the ways that public policy has virtually excluded communities of color from everything that American society defines as desirable: first-rate education, decent housing, asset accumulation, political power, social status, satisfying work, and even the power to shape and narrate their own history. White supremacy is no thing of the past, no fringe movement. It is a pervasive and pernicious system that restricts the political and cultural agency of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinos every day. Unearned and unacknowledged, race-based advantages, not greater merit or a superior work ethic, account for white privilege. Lipsitz's ultimate point is not to condemn all white people as racists but to challenge everyone to begin a principled examination of personal actions and political commitments. Exposing the system of unfairness is not enough. People of all groups-but especially white people because they benefit from that system-have to work toward eradicating the rewards of whiteness. Author note: George Lipsitz is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC, San Diego, and the author of A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Temple), Rainbow At Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, Dangerous Crossroads, and Time Passages.

How White People Profit from Identity Politics

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Luke Charles Harris

Kimberle Crenshaw

Written by a trio of celebrated scholars, The Race Track is a twenty-first-century road map to how race operates in America today. From its covert and psychological dimensions to how race plays a key role in allocating assets to some while denying them to others and a “whiteness protection program” that keeps race-based advantages intact, this landmark new book challenges some of society’s most cherished notions— about merit, markets, and choice, and about the causes and consequences of unequal racial outcomes. As leaders of a cutting-edge think-tank, the authors have crafted an essential guide to contemporary racism based on years of looking beyond the ivory tower and talking to ordinary people from all walks of life. Amid all the “post-racial” rhetoric, The Race Track boldly claims that it is not racist to talk about race while structural racism is alive and well. Asserting that color-bound problems cannot be remedied with colorblind solutions, this courageous new work lays out what the full range of responses must be if we are truly interested in achieving justice for all people.

Understanding and Challenging Structural Racism

The Race Track

Now updated to include the final chapter of Ivory Perry's life, this new edition completes the life story of the grass-roots activist whose flamboyant direct action protests and patient behind the scenes organizing helped educate and agitate his community in the struggle for civil rights and economic opportunity.

Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition

A Life In The Struggle

Examines the effect of immigrants' musical traditions on mainstream music in cultures around the world

Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place

Dangerous Crossroads

Daniel Martinez HoSang

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines’ research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.

Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines

Seeing Race Again

The America that seems to be disappearing before our very eyes is, George Lipsitz argues, actually the cumulative creation of yesterday's struggles over identity, culture, and power. At a critical moment, this book offers a richly textured historical perspective on where our notions of national knowledge have come from and where they may lead. Showing how American studies has been shaped by the social movements of the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s, Lipsitz identifies the ways in which the globalization of commerce and culture are producing radically new understandings of politics, performance, consumption, knowledge, and nostalgia. Book jacket.

American Studies in a Moment of Danger

Strategies of Independence in the Postwar Working Class

A Rainbow at Midnight

Class and Culture in Cold War America

Daniel Fischlin

Ajay Heble

The Fierce Urgency of Now offers an impassioned call to take the practices of musical improvisation often associated with jazz performance as a model for social-justice activism.

Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation

The Fierce Urgency of Now

Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

Time Passages

Marla Berns

A Project by Renée Stout

Dear Robert, I'll See You at the Crossroads

Probes postwar AmericaOCOs complicated relationship between historical memory and commercial cultureOCopopular television, music, and film."

Collective Memory and American Popular Culture: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

Tere Romo

University art museum (Santa Barbara, Calif).

Raphael Perez-Torres

Carol Wells

Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art

Just Another Poster? investigates the critical role posters and other graphic materials played in the Chicano struggle for self-determination in California, from the borderland of San Diego to the urban metropolis of San Francisco. This volume of essays by an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators represents the first comprehensive study of the ways the poster, as a medium of expression largely relegated to the margins of art world display, distribution, and critical reception, has been a primary form of cultural expression within Chicano communities in California and across America. Chon Noriega is associate professor of film and television at the Univerity of Califonria at Los Angeles. The other contributors include JosŽ Montoya, George Lipsitz, Tere Romo, Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Rafael PŽrez-Torres, and Carol A. Wells.

Chicano Graphic Arts in California

Just Another Poster?

In a world tour that touches down in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Budapest, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, George Lipsitz explores the fusion of immigrant and mainstream cultures to be found in world music including rap, jazz, reggae, zouk, bhangra, juju, swamp pop, Puerto Rican bugalu and Chicano punk.

Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place

This volume provides coverage of musical styles from around the world, from Havana to Tokyo. It explores the fusion of immigrant and mainstream cultures displayed in world music, including: rap, jazz, reggae, zouk, bhangra, juju, swamp pop, and Puerto Rican Bugalu and Chicano punk.

Rainbow at Midnight details the origins and evolution of working-class strategies for independence during and after World War II. Arguing that the 1940s may well have been the most revolutionary decade in U.S. history, George Lipsitz combines popular culture, politics, economics, and history to show how war mobilization transformed the working class and how that transformation brought issues of race, gender, and democracy to the forefront of American political culture. This book is a substantially revised and expanded work developed from the author's heralded 1981 Class and Culture in Cold War America.

Labor and Culture in the 1940s

Rainbow at Midnight

Barbara Tomlinson

Insubordinate spaces are places of possibility, products of acts of accompaniment and improvisation that deepen capacities for democratic social change. Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz's Insubordinate Spaces explores the challenges facing people committed to social justice in an era when social institutions have increasingly been reconfigured to conform to the imperatives of a market society. In their book, the authors argue that education, the arts, and activism are key terrains of political and ideological conflict. They explore and analyze exemplary projects responding to current social justice issues and crises, from the Idle No More movement launched by Indigenous people in Canada to the performance art of Chingo Bling, Fandango convenings, the installation art of Ramiro Gomez, and the mass protests proclaiming "Black Lives Matter" in Ferguson, MO. Tomlinson and Lipsitz draw on key concepts from struggles to advance ideas about reciprocal recognition and co-creation as components in the construction of new egalitarian and democratic social relations, practices, and institutions.

Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice

Insubordinate Spaces

How racism shapes urban spaces and how African Americans create vibrant communities that offer models for more equitable social arrangements.

How Racism Takes Place

Considered by many to be the godfather of R&B, Johnny Otis—musician, producer, artist, entrepreneur, pastor, disc jockey, writer, and tireless fighter for racial equality—has had a remarkable life by any measure. In this first biography of Otis, George Lipsitz tells the largely unknown story of a towering figure in the history of African American music and culture who was, by his own description, “black by persuasion.” Born to Greek immigrant parents in Vallejo, California, in 1921, Otis grew up in an integrated neighborhood and identified deeply with black music and culture from an early age. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man and submerged himself in the city’s vibrant African American cultural life, centered on Central Avenue and its thriving music scene. Otis began his six-decade career in music playing drums in territory swing bands in the 1930s. He went on to lead his own band in the 1940s and open the Barrelhouse nightclub in Watts. His R&B band had seventeen Top 40 hits between 1950 and 1969, including “Willie and the Hand Jive.” As a producer and A&R man, Otis discovered such legends as Etta James, Jackie Wilson, and Big Mama Thornton. Otis also wrote a column for the Sentinel, one of L.A.’s leading black newspapers, became pastor of his own interracial church, hosted popular radio and television shows that introduced millions to music by African American artists, and was lauded as businessman of the year in a 1951 cover story in Negro Achievements magazine. Throughout his career Otis’s driving passion has been his fearless and unyielding opposition to racial injustice, whether protesting on the front lines, exposing racism and championing the accomplishments of black Americans, or promoting African American musicians. Midnight at the Barrelhouse is a chronicle of a life rich in both incident and inspiration, as well as an exploration of the complicated nature of race relations in twentieth-century America. Otis’s total commitment to black culture and transcendence of racial boundaries, Lipsitz shows, teach important lessons about identity, race, and power while encapsulating the contradictions of racism in American society.

George Lipsitz

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