George Lipsitz

In Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, George Lipsitz wishes “to explore the ways in which collective memory and popular culture are peculiarly linked – how the infinitely renewable present of electronic mass media creates a crisis for collective memory, and how collective memory decisively frames the production and reception of commercial culture” (pg. vii). He further believes, “The ever expanding influence, reach, and scope of mass media has worked insidiously to legitimate exploitative social hierarchies, to colonize the body as a site of capital accumulation, and to inculcate within us the idea that consumer desire is the logical center of human existence” (pg. vii). He cautions, “This book is not one of those exercises that finds only the debased and distorted in American history and culture. For all its crimes, this is too good a country, its cultures too rich and varied and inspiring to justify that kind of pessimism, a pessimism that masquerades as critique but which is so one-dimensional that it ultimately serves as a form of collaboration with the oppressors” (pg. xvi).
Lipsitz writes, “The powerful apparatuses of contemporary commercial electronic mass communications dominate discourse in the modern world” (pg. 4). He continues, “Instead of relating to the past through a shared sense of place or ancestry, consumers of electronic mass media can experience a common heritage with people they have never seen; they can acquire memories of a past to which they have no geographic or biological connection” (pg. 5). Further, “Most often…culture exists as a form of politics, as a means of reshaping individual and collective practice for specified interests, and as long as individuals perceive their interests as unfilled, culture retains an oppositional potential” (pg. 16-17). Of television, Lipsitz writes, “By addressing viewers as atomized consumers, the medium obscures experiences of race, region, class, and gender. By turning politics into entertainment, television transforms citizens into spectators and turns politicians into performers” (pg. 19). Discussing sitcoms, Lipsitz writes, “Representations of generational and gender tensions undercut the legitimating authority of the televised traditional working-class family by demonstrating the chasm between memories of yesterday and the realities of today” (pg. 57). Further, “With its penetration of the family and its incessant propaganda for commodity purchases, television helped erode the social base for challenges to authority manifest in the mass political activity among American workers in the 1940s. Yet television did not so much ensure the supremacy of new values as it transformed the terms of social contestation” (pg. 73-74).
Discussing rock-and-roll as a window into class, Lipsitz writes, “Industrial labor created the preconditions for rock and roll, and the first rock-and-roll artists, entrepreneurs, and audiences came out of wartime working-class communities” (pg. 116). He continues, “Consumption of mass popular culture always involves varied motivations and complex choices, and it is difficult to account fully for any specific consumer choice. But at least part of the motivation for the middle-class white youth adoption of Afro-American and working-class music as their own in the 1950s stemmed from a collective judgment about the demise of the urban industrial city and the rise of the suburb” (pg. 122). Of film, Lipsitz writes, “Whether situated in the past, present, or future, commercial motion pictures invariably resonate with the value crises of the times in which they appear. Thus they are historical in the sense of being cultural artifacts and social-history evidence about the times in which they were made. But films are historical in another way as well: they reposition us for the future by reshaping our memories of the past” (pg. 164).
Lipsitz writes, “Story-telling that leaves history to the oppressor, that imagines a world of desire detached from the world of necessity, cannot challenge the hegemony of dominant discourse. But story-telling that combines subjectivity and objectivity, that employs the insights and passions of myth and folklore in the service of revising history, can be a powerful tool of contestation” (pg. 212-213). Further, “Counter-memory is a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story” (pg. 213). He continues, “Outside of popular culture, personal and collective memories of region, race, class, gender, and ethnicity continue to provide the raw materials for shared stories. But the pervasiveness of popular narrative forms and themes is not just a matter of the sedimented residue of historical communities and cultures. Mass society and commercial culture provoke a new popular narrative response, one that draws upon both old and new forms of cultural creation” (pg. 234).
Lipsitz concludes, “During the postwar era, commercial popular culture has functioned largely to fashion a symbolic order conducive to the interests of corporate America…They suppress knowledge about cultural and historical differences to unite the audience as a homogenous buying public; then they create and exaggerate petty divisions – based on brand loyalty, fashion, style – to divide the audience into market segments” (pg. 259).… (meer)

In The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition, George Lipsitz “argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a ‘possessive investment in whiteness’ that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society” (pg. vii). He further argues, “White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity” (pg. vii). He contends, “The artificial construction of whiteness almost always comes to possess white people themselves unless they develop antiracist identities, unless they disinvest and divest themselves of their investments in white supremacy” (pg. viii). Lipsitz writes, “Race is a cultural construct, but one with deadly social 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 the creation of social structures that generate economic advantages for European Americans through the possessive investment in whiteness” (pg. 2). Finally, he argues, “The increased possessive investment in whiteness generated by disinvestment in U.S. cities, factories, and schools since the 1970s disguises as racial problems the general social problems posed by deindustrialization, economic, restructuring, and neoconservative attacks on the welfare state and the social wage. It fuels a discourse that demonizes people of color for being victimized by these changes, while hiding the privileges of whiteness” (pg. 18).
Lipsitz writes, “Whitness has a value in our society. Its value originates not in the wisdom of white home buyers or the improvements they have made on their properties, but from the ways in which patterns of bad faith and nonenforcement of antidiscrimination laws have enabled the beneficiaries of past and present discrimination to protect their gains and pass them on the succeeding generations” (pg. 33). Discussing the memory of war, Lipsitz writes, “The deployment of memories about World War II as a ‘good war’ also rested on nostalgia for a preintegration America, when segregation in the military meant that most war heroes were white, while de jure and de facto segregation on the home front channeled the fruits and benefits of victory disproportionately to white citizens” (pg. 76). Turning to neoconservatives’ like Charles Murray and Dinesh D’Souza, he writes, “Their efforts to portray the victims of racism as the beneficiaries of unearned privileges given to them because of their race hide the history of the possessive investment in whiteness and invert the history of racial politics in the United States” (pg. 96). He continues, “Whitness does its work in the United States as a structured advantage, as a built-in bias that prevents hard-working people from securing just rewards for their labor and ingenuity. It produces unfair gains and unjust rewards for all whites, although not uniformly and equally. As a matter of justice, whites should be interested in abolishing it, in relinquishing the unfair gains and unearned enrichments that flow from it” (pg. 106). Further, “The neoconservatism of our time has not only widened the gap between rich and poor, between whites and communitites of color, but it has also encouraged the growth of a vigilante mentality, as violent and sadistic as the crimes it purports to oppose” (pg. 145). Viewing the consumption of minority-produced as a form of romanticism, Lipsitz writes, “This romanticism contributes to the possessive investment in whiteness by maintaining the illusion that individual whites can appropriate aspects of African American experience for their own benefit without having to acknowledge the factors that gave African Americans and European Americans widely divergent opportunities and life chances” (pg. 120).… (meer)