all the words past the margin

I finished The Possessive Investment in Whiteness yesterday. There are moments when i think Lipsitz is incredibly strong. The chapter on the failures of the civil rights project is fantastic, as is the chapter on Blues and 'the African' in African American culture, (and i'm not just daying that because he brings up the Eric Clapton-Enoch Powell affair and I hate Eric Clapton.) As in Dangerous Crossroads, I think Lipsitz is very convincing when he writes about race, music, and the politics of expropriation. Also very useful is Lipsitz' emphasis on identities as mutable and historically contingent formations and on the struggles through which identities are formed and contested as key elements of social movements "invesiting in" and urging divestment from whiteness. There are moments when I think Lipsitz's clear, accessible writing style is emotionally evocative and viscerally powerful. There are also moments where I think he makes introducing further complexity into some of the dynamics he tackles difficult and I find the absence of complexity in some of his arguments nagging and frustrating. Lipsitz's chapter on the OJ Simpson Trial is very even-handed and also very incisive and when i walked into Barnes and Noble the other day and saw Mark Fuhrman's latest hard-cover best seller on display, i was at first bemused, and then wanted to throw up. Can someone please explain to me how a racist cop from a brutal, racist police department is a best selling non-fiction author?

Anway, I've now started Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire, which is brilliant so far and deals with a lot of the themes that popped up here and there when I was doing research for H.V.C. this summer and looking through archived letters from the Pan African Federation to St. Clair Drake or between George Padmore and Ras Makonnen or at the columns Padmore wrote for the Chicago Defender. I was actually supposed to read Von Eschen's book over three years ago for Seth Fein's lecture class, but never got around to doing so on account of the overwhelming depression i was in the middle of that semester which kept me near-paralyzed in my room, occasionally coming out to go to SLAC meetings, wander up and down broadway glouring at yuppies-in-formation, do the work for "Strikes In Twentieth Century History and Culture," teach UMOJA, and flail through the half-semester of my failed attempt at learning Yiddish prior to dropping it. I wish i'd read it then, I'm glad I'm doing so now.