Review by Choice Review
Lipsitz's 20th-anniversary reissue has only shown how prescient and important this book was from first press. The book is predicated on the idea that race is a social fact, even though it is a biologic, cultural, and scientific fiction. White people benefit from their whiteness, and therefore have a vested interested in preserving racial hierarchies even when they appear to be tearing them down or instituting supposedly race-neutral policies and ideas. He argues that public policy and private prejudices mutually reinforce each other to develop an economic, social, and political value in being white and thus reify racial hierarchies. Placement on that hierarchy has implications for earnings, wealth, life expectancy, and well-being. Attempts to create a race-benign society cannot succeed without recognizing historical burdens. Weaving together literary references, scientific studies, and court cases, and using well-known contemporary events like Hurricane Katrina, police killings of young African-American men, the Charleston massacre, and many historical events that may be lesser known, he illustrates how white fear and failure are the sources for the development of ethnonationalism. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Robin A. Harper, York College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
