How Racism Takes Place

by George Lipsitz

Overview

White identity in the United States is place bound, asserts George Lipsitz in How Racism Takes Place. An influential scholar in American and racial studies, Lipsitz contends that racism persists because a network of practices skew opportunities and life chances along racial lines. That is, these practices assign people of different races to different spaces and therefore allow grossly unequal access to education, employment, transportation, and shelter.

Revealing how seemingly race-neutral urban sites contain hidden racial assumptions and imperatives, Lipsitz examines the ways in which urban space and social experience are racialized and emphasizes that aggrieved communities do not passively acquiesce to racism. He recognizes the people and communities that have reimagined segregated spaces in expressive culture as places for congregation.

How Racism Takes Place not only exposes the degree to which this white spatial imagining structures our society but also celebrates the black artists and activists who struggle to create a just and decent society.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439902578
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	03/11/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	310
File size:	685 KB

About the Author

George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His previous books include The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics and A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (both Temple). Lipsitz serves as President of the Advisory Board of the African American Policy Forum and as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance.

Table of Contents

Introduction. "Race, Place, and Power"

1. The White Spatial Imaginary 36-76

2. The Black Spatial Imaginary 77-107

3. Space, Sports, and Spectatorship in St. Louis 108-144

4. The Crime The Wire Couldn’t Name. Social Decay and Cynical Detachment in Baltimore 145-175

5. Horace Tapscott and the World Stage in Los Angeles 195- 225

6. John Biggers and Project Row Houses in Houston” 226-255

7. “Betye Saar’s Los Angeles and Paule Marshall’s Brooklyn” 256-293

8. “Something Left to Love. Lorraine Hansberry’s Chicago” 294-324

9. New Orleans Today. We Know This Place 325-370

10. A Place Where Everybody Is Somebody 371-399

Acknowledgments

Index


 

Editorial Reviews

"George Lipsitz’s new book, How Racism Takes Place, has a great deal to teach Americans—especially white Americans—about the devastating effects of contemporary racism. Lipsitz utilizes the best research and brilliant arguments to demonstrate how racism continues to fester in racially segregated neighborhoods, workforces, suburbs, schools and country clubs. He demonstrates convincingly that contemporary racism did not emerge accidently but by historical and contemporary designs of white Americans whether they know it or not. How Racism Takes Place is a must read, for it challenges us to grapple with our racial demons and, in the process, become a people truly representing the democratic claims we broadcast throughout the globe."
—Aldon Morris, Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University

"How Racism Takes Place is a brilliant, timely, and much needed book about racial segregation—how it is produced and reproduced, how white privilege and the subjugation of people of color have a clear spatial dimension, and how the racialization of space and the spatialization of race shape, and are manifestations of, the political and cultural economy of the United States. Beyond unveiling the mechanics of structural racism, Lipsitz also draws out what he calls a ‘Black spatial imaginary,’ the site of expressive culture where aggrieved and displaced peoples have waged a struggle to resist and survive policies of racial segregation and conceived a different future."

—Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California

From the Publisher