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Student eResources Chapter 3 Page 1 of 14

Racist AmericaRoots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations

STUDENT eRESOURCES

Joe R. Feagin and Kimberley Ducey

Instructor eResources Chapter 3 Page 2 of 14

3The White Racial Frame

A Social Force

Learning Objectives

After completing this chapter, students should be able to:

1. Understand the creation of the white racial frame2. Describe the Eurocentric beginnings of the modern white racial frame3. Understand the link between early color-coding and slavery4. Understand how the concept “race” developed5. Describe the celebration and expansion of the white racial frame from the 1830s to the

1930s6. Describe the perpetuation of the white racial frame in contemporary U.S. society

Summary

The systemic racism that is still part of the base of U.S. society is interwoven with a strong racial framing that has been partially reworked at various points in U.S. history, but which has remained a well-institutionalized set of emotion-laden attitudes, concepts, images, and narratives defending white virtue and white superiority and the subordination to whites of black Americans and other Americans of color. Until the late 1940s, U.S. whites’ commitment to this white-supremacist view was widespread, proud, and insistent. Most whites in the U.S. and Europe took pride in forthrightly professing racist perspectives on others and racist rationalizations for racial segregation and imperialistic adventures. Brutal discrimination and overt exploitation were routinely implemented. Whites’ global domination was “seen as proof of white racial superiority.”

Beginning in the 1940s, however, public expression of a belligerent white-nationalist perspective was made difficult by a growing U.S. awareness of actions of the racist regime in Nazi Germany. By the 1950s and 1960s, organized civil rights protests against U.S. racism — with their sustained counter-framing of real freedom and social justice — and the U.S. struggle with the then-Soviet Union for global superiority made this public expression of a strong white-supremacist or white-nationalist ideology much less acceptable, at least in public places.

Yet, many important aspects of the age-old white racial frame, now often dressed up in a new guise, have sturdily persisted. From the beginning of this society to the present, emphasis on the superiority of white Western culture and institutions has been basic in that dominant frame, one that still rationalizes persisting racial discrimination in its subtle, covert, and blatant forms. That whites are generally more virtuous than people of color has remained central since the 1960s civil rights era. Indeed, this dominant white racial framing is the normal condition for U.S. society, and not only sustains continuing discrimination but also its periodic sociopolitical


expansion — such as the white nativistic and nationalistic resurgence during and since the election of President Donald Trump. Trump’s election was, to a substantial degree, the result of the white majority’s fear of the increasingly multiracial character of U.S. society, a reality dramatically symbolized in the previous election of the first U.S. president who was not white, Barack Obama.

Control over a society’s ideas and discourse includes control over its central conceptual metaphors. Powerful whites generally decide what the dominant images and metaphors are, and thus what is or is not seen as true. Metaphors are thus integral to the dominant conceptual framework. For some time now, elite whites and most other whites have viewed the last few centuries of societal developments in terms of broad metaphorical imagery equating the engine of “human progress” with Western civilization. We hear phrases like “Western civilization is an engine generating great progress for the world” or “Africans have only seen advancement because of contacts with Western civilization.” White Western imperialism’s bringing of “civilization” or “democracy” to other peoples is made to appear as an engine of great progress. However, this equating of “progress” with European civilization conceals the devastating consequences of European and U.S. imperialism and colonialism. When Europeans and European Americans speak of Western civilization as equivalent to great human progress, they are talking about the creation of white-dominated societal systems that do not take into serious consideration the interests and views of the original, enslaved, and exploited peoples of color whose resources and labor have often been ripped from them, whose societies have been harmed or destroyed, and whose lives have been cut short.

Key Terms

affirmative actionanti-others subframebio-racial termsCaucasiansColonialismcolorblindnesscolor typingcounter-framingequal opportunity (rhetoric of)eugenicsgroup-remedy programsimperialism individualistic Protestant ethic“IQ” (intelligence quotient) testsJim Crownaturalization lawspost-racialpro-white subframepsychological wage of whitenessrace


racial-group interest convergenceracialization of cultureReconstructionscientific racismsincere fictionssocial alexithymiaSocial Darwinismsystemic racismteleological racismthree-fifths compromiseurban Bantustansvirtuous republicansWestern civilizationwhitewhite fragilitywhite innocence White Man’s Burdenwhite racial framewhite-to-black racial desirability continuumwhite virtue

Study Tip

Exam Preparation: Ten Study Tips [[https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/health-and-support/exam-preparation-ten-study-tips]]

Web Resources

Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.

Exercise 3.1

Examine how scientists and rationalists whitewash the Enlightenment to score points against identity politics

The Use of Dubious Science to Defend Racism is as Old as the Founding Fathers [[https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/use-dubious-science-defend-racism-old-founding-fathers-ncna823116]]

Exercise 3.2

Read about Interest Convergence and the Republican Party


“Interest Convergence” and the Republican Party [[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-j-blumenfeld/interest-convergence-and-_b_2119973.html]]

Exercise 3.3

Learn more about the Kerner Commission Report

Kerner Commission Report [[https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/kerner-commission-report-released]]

Exercise 3.4

How much has changed since the Kerner Commission Report?

Study Shows Little Change Since Kerner Commission Reported on Racism 50 Years Ago [[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-shows-little-change-segregation-and-poverty-over-last-fifty-years-180968317/]]

Exercise 3.5

Learn more about how color-blindness is counterproductive and how sociologists argue that ideologies claiming not to see race risk ignoring discrimination

Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive [[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/]]

Exercise 3.6

Learn more about The Bell Curve’s endorsement of systemic racism.

The Real Problem with Charles Murray and “The Bell Curve” [[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/]]

Exercise 3.7

Learn more about the Moynihan Report

The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition [[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/]]


Exercise 3.8

Read about Robin DiAngelo and “White Fragility”

A Sociologist Examines the “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism [[https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism]]

Exercise 3.9Read more about how the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow to craft legal discrimination

How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow [[https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow]] and/or How the Nazis Used Jim Crow Laws as the Model for Their Race Laws [[https://billmoyers.com/story/hitler-america-nazi-race-law/]]

Exercise 3.10

In the 1930s, the German elite was fascinated with the U.S.’s elite’s codified racism. What did the American elite teach them?

What America Taught the Nazis [[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/]]

Exercise 3.11

Explore how U.S. racism influenced Adolf Hitler

How American Racism Influenced Hitler [[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler]]

Exercise 3.12

Is invisibility a modern form of racism? Read more

Invisibility is the Modern Form of Racism Against Native Americans [[https://www.teenvogue.com/story/racism-against-native-americans]]

Multiple-Choice

Eurocentric Framing: Early Views1. In a 1550 debate, Spanish theologian __________ argued that it was lawful to enslave

African populations because of their heathen natures, which obligated them to serve those with the superior culture (the Spanish).a. Antonio del Corrob. Petrus Martinez de Osmac. Casiodoro de Reinad. Gaines de Sepulveda


e. Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo

Early Color Coding: The Link to Slavery2. In _________, the colony of Virginia established the first explicit law against

interracial sex, and in _________ a law against interracial marriage was enforced by banishment.a. 1531; 1560b. 1662; 1691c. 1770; 1799d. 1803; 1833

Developing a More Explicit Framing of “Race”3. Over his lifetime, __________ owned hundreds of African Americans, even though he

periodically, and hypocritically, asserted that he disliked slavery.a. John Adamsb. Benjamin Franklinc. Alexander Hamiltond. Thomas Jeffersone. James Madison

4. German anatomist and anthropologist ____________ coined the term “Caucasians” (Europeans) because in his judgment the people of the Caucasus were the most beautiful Europeans. a. Johann Blumenbachb. Wilfrid Le Gros Clarkc. Carsten Niemitzd. Rudolf Wagnere. Franz Weidenreich

Celebrating and Expanding the Racist Frame: The 1830s to the 1930s5. Between 1878 and 1923, a series of federal court cases decided that the following

Americans were closer to the “black end” of the white-to-black racial desirability continuum than to the “white end”:a. Japanese Americansb. Filipino Americansc. American who are three-quarters Filipinod. Korean Americanse. All the above

Perpetuating the Racial Frame: The Contemporary United States

6. Findings in a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) reveal: a. that while almost all twelfth-grade students in the U.S. take a civics course, most

could not pass a rudimentary civics test at a “proficient” level.


b. that most Americans do not know the most basic facts about the U.S. political system.

c. that most Americans do not understand why knowing basic facts about the U.S. political system really matters.

d. All the above7. This sociologist coined the phrase white fragility to describe that which prevents white

Americans from confronting racism.a. Robin DiAngelob. Kimberley Duceyc. Joe Feagind. Paul Kivel

True or False

Eurocentric Framing: Early Views1. The anti-Native American elements of the old white racial frame are perhaps the most

developed and have long included various rationalizations for oppression.a. Trueb. False

2. From the first century of colonization, white Europeans have portrayed themselves as, to use Ronald Takaki’s phrase, virtuous democrats.a. Trueb. False

Early Color Coding: The Link to Slavery3. English colonists had power to shape the everyday terminology used in interaction with

one another and with those they oppressed. In Old English, the word “black” meant dirty, while “white” meant to beam radiantly. a. Trueb. False

4. In line with earlier Christian usage, “black” was used by the English colonists to describe evil and malevolent spirits. a. Trueb. False

5. In the first century and a half, 65 percent of all those enslaved were located in Virginia.a. Trueb. False

Developing a More Explicit Framing of “Race”6. By the late 1700s, hierarchical racial relations were increasingly explained in overtly

bio-racial terms.a. Trueb. False


7. Benjamin Franklin articulated the first extensive arguments by a North American intellectual for black racial inferiority.a. Trueb. False

8. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the hierarchy of “races of mankind,” one of the early uses of the term “races” in the sense of biologically distinct, hierarchical categories.a. Trueb. False

Celebrating and Expanding the Racist Frame: The 1830s to the 1930s9. In his 1830 lectures the leading German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel spoke about the

“Negro” as “natural man in his wild and untamed nature” and argued that there is “nothing remotely humanized in the Negro’s character.”a. Trueb. False

10. Before he became president, Abraham Lincoln argued that the physical difference between racial groups was insuperable.a. Trueb. False

11. Carl Brigham argued pugnaciously for the intellectual inferiority of various racial groups, using data from psychometric tests given to World War I draftees.a. Trueb. False


12. Recent surveys indicate that college graduates are startlingly uninformed about U.S. history and the political system. a. Trueb. False

13. Shared convergence is a term that refers to the white elite acting to improve the conditions of black Americans only when whites benefit in the process.a. Trueb. False

14. The authors of The Bell Curve had no training in genetics but that didn’t stop them from writing about racial differences in IQ scores.a. Trueb. False

15. Social disaffectation is a term that refers to the inability of a great many whites to understand where African Americans and other Americans of color are coming from and what their racialized experiences are like.a. Trueb. False


Study/Review Questions

Creating a White Racial Frame1. Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey write: “For the colonizing Europeans it was not enough

just to bleed the world of labor and resources. Most saw themselves as virtuous Christians and felt the need to justify what they were doing for themselves and their descendants.” Illustrate Feagin’s and Ducey’s argument.

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels long ago pointed out, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Using Marx’s and Engels’s famous words as your starting point, describe the white racial frame.

Eurocentric Framing: Early Views3. The white racial frame has been elaborated and changed somewhat over time. Describe its

variations as it has operated over time to rationalize, sustain, and script white power and white privilege.

4. Discuss the impact of the individualistic Protestant ethic on the framing of virtuous whites and uncivilized others.

5. In Europe and the Americas, a commonplace European or European American explanation for the exploitation and enslavement of other groups, especially people of African descent, drew on an old myth based on the biblical story of Noah and his sons. Describe this myth.

Early Color Coding: The Link to Slavery6. Explain how the expansion of enslavement and color typing developed side by side,

thereby reinforcing each other. 7. Trace the increasingly used word “white” by colonists who distinguished themselves

favorably from “negroes.” 8. Explain how the controlling language in the new nation was that of English colonists and

what this meant to early color coding.9. Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey write: “[T]he anti-black framing was not “out there,” but

rather in the white mind (brain), and riddled with racialized emotions.” Explain.10. Discuss how since the colonial era, educational institutions have been critical to the

transmission of the dominant anti-black framing.11. Describe how since the seventeenth century, white racial framing has justified anti-black

oppression and has had a very strong emotional character.12. Explain how fear is central to the white-racist framing woven through the system of anti-

black oppression.13. According to Joel Kovel, why do many whites often react negatively and viscerally to the

presence or image of the black body, especially that of black men?14. Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey write: “Significantly, of the three large-scale systems of

social oppression — racism, sexism, and classism — only racism involves the dominant group having a deeply rooted and often obsessively emotional fear of the subordinated group.” Explain.


Developing a More Explicit Framing of “Race”15. An early analyst noted that the modern racist perspective did not arise out of some

“abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups,” but rather grew out of the exploitative relationships of colonialism. Explain.

16. Describe how by the late 1700s, hierarchical racial relations were increasingly explained in overtly bio-racial terms.

17. Challenge the argument that “race was, from its inception, a folk classification, a product of popular beliefs about human differences.”

18. Many people have long viewed Immanuel Kant, the leading philosopher of the West, as uncontaminated by racist thought. Explain why this view of Kant is inaccurate.

19. Describe how from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, leading scientists developed a scientific view of black Americans and other people of color as innately inferior and thus deserving of subordination.

20. Discuss how most white scientists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while presenting themselves as objective observers, tried to marshal evidence for human differences that the European imperialists’ perspective had already decided were important to highlight.

Celebrating and Expanding the Racist Frame: The 1830s to the 1930s21. Discuss incidents of elite whites combatting the counter-framed insights and actions of

slave rebellions, abolitionist movements, and civil rights movements.22. Describe the impact of nineteenth century French diplomat and prominent racist thinker,

Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, on the U.S. and Nazi Germany.23. In the United States, distinguished lawyers, judges, and political leaders promoted

scientific racism and its white-supremacist assumptions. In the first half of the nineteenth century whites with an economic interest in slavery dominated the U.S. political and legal system. Explain how this influence was conspicuous in the Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford (1857) decision.

24. With a focus on distinguished judges, including Supreme Court judges, explain how with the end of Reconstruction in 1877 came comprehensive Jim Crow segregation in the South and other areas. Be sure to include Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in your explanation.

25. Given increasing immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from non-European countries, white male government officials gave much attention to who was, or was not, “white.” Explain how this focus is evocative of present-day white racial framing.

26. Describe Social Darwinism.27. William Graham Sumner is considered a “founding father” of U.S. sociology. What does

this tell us about how capitalism and its elites have shaped the dominant assumptions underlying sociology in North America and Europe?

28. Describe the 1800s eugenics movement. Be sure to discuss the views of Francis Galton and Nathaniel S. Shaler.

29. Who was Madison Grant and what did he argue about new immigrant groups from southern and eastern Europe?


30. Describe the influential book titled, The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard.

31. Discuss the parallels between Lothrop Stoddard’s views and some white political leaders and commentators today.

32. Explain how scientific racism was periodically used by white members of Congress to support passage of discriminatory legislation.

33. Explain how Germany’s Adolf Hitler was influenced by U.S. Jim Crow patterns. 34. Define teleological racism.35. Explain Rudyard Kipling’s perspective in his 1899 poem titled, “The White Man’s

Burden.”36. Focusing on the 1830s to the early 1900s, and European immigrants, discuss how ordinary

whites have come to look at their social worlds in white-racist terms and accepted the “psychological wage of whiteness” and racist ideas propagated by those in the white elite.


37. In recent decades the powerful white elite has continued to dominate the construction and transmission of new or refurbished racist ideas, images, and narratives designed to buttress the system of racial inequality, including through the mass media. Discuss.

38. Compare and contrast reactions to citizen protests by the conservative wing of the white elite, the more liberal wing of the elite, and the center of the elite.

39. How do key members of the white elite encourage collective ignorance and mobilize a mass consensus on elite-generated ideas and views?

40. Discuss significant changes in whites’ discriminatory practices and in the rationalizing white frame since the 1960s.

41. Describe the Cold War’s link to anti-segregation discourse. Explain it in terms of Derrick Bell’s theory of “interest convergence.”

42. By the 1950s, and accelerating in the 1960s, the moderately liberal fraction of the white elite was pressing for a softening of blatantly racist prejudices and for new group-based remedies. Explain this change of heart in terms of Derrick Bell’s theory of “interest convergence.”

43. Describe the significance of the 1968 Kerner Commission Report.44. Discuss how with the demise of legal segregation from the 1950s to the 1970s, real racial

equality was not on the agenda of societal change for most whites as the dominant white racial frame continued to incorporate many of its old anti-black and other racist features.

45. Describe how beginning in the late 1960s with Richard Nixon’s presidential administration, the rhetoric of “equal opportunity” and “colorblindness” was accompanied by a federal government aggressively backing away from commitments to racial desegregation and enforcement of civil rights laws.

46. Describe the significance of the City of Richmond, Virginia v. J. A. Croson Co.47. Describe conservative Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s 2016 effort to challenge in court

the modest affirmative action efforts still left in college admissions programs.


48. In recent decades a few social and physical scientists at major universities, such as Arthur Jensen at the University of California and Richard Herrnstein at Harvard University, have continued to argue that racial-group differences in average scores on the so-called “IQ” (intelligence quotient) tests reveal genetic differences in intelligence between whites and certain Americans of color. Discuss their work.

49. Who is Jason Richwine? Compare his work to the work of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

50. Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey write: “White scholars and popular analysts who continue to make ill-informed, biologically oriented arguments about “IQ” and racial groups do not recognize that they are thinking out of an uncritical white frame of reference. They write as though there is no other way to view the group data on these conventional skills tests (inaccurately named “intelligence” tests), usually of children, other than their racist framing of the supposedly lesser intelligence of children of color.” Explain further how ill-informed these arguments are.

51. Drawing on the example of Steve King, a long-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, explain how over recent decades, versions of arguments about superior white intelligence, culture, and civilization have periodically been used by white members of Congress and other officials for various political purposes.

52. Discuss how even though a century of physical and social science has shown how socially constructed and useless for assessing real biological ancestry and health issues old racist categories are, their dominance in Western culture is so strong that some physical scientists cannot resist using them.

53. What is the racialization of culture?54. Describe the significance of the Moynihan report and its enduring impact in explaining

“black problems” in cultural terms. In the process, explain the failure to deal in depth with the systemic racism that is much more central to explaining well the difficult economic and family conditions faced by these impoverished Americans.

55. In Chapter 3, Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey examine how the white elite and its supporters have insistently fostered a racial framing rationalizing the everyday realities of unjust impoverishment and enrichment across the color line. Explain how this effort is a major source of the racist framing held in the minds of the non-elite population.

56. Who are urban Bantustans?57. Discuss the important aspect of the contemporary white racial frame that buttresses

systemic racism in the U.S. – that is, the omnipresent notion of white innocence and white virtue.

58. Drawing on examples from Chapter 3, illustrate how white defensiveness about systemic racism is seen today in numerous assertions that the United States is a “post-racial” society.

59. Recall that systemic racism involves social alexithymia, which is the learned inability and/or unwillingness of whites to understand the lived experiences of people of color. Meaningful transformation is possible, however. It is not easy and typically involves at least three stages: sympathy, empathy, and autopathy. Do you have hope for white elites who engage in fear mongering and negative racial framing of immigrants and the so-called “browning of America” given what meaningful transformation requires?


60. Describe how powerful whites, including media commentators and officials, have downplayed persisting white racism and accented the image of a society where equality of opportunity and colorblindness are supposedly the reality.

61. Describe the work of sociologist Jennifer Mueller, who has examined the ways that whites protect a colorblind (e.g., “I ignore a person’s race”) presentation of themselves and society.

62. What is white fragility? 63. Associated with a rosy view of U.S. society and the assertion of white innocence is a

romanticizing of the racist past. Discuss how this romanticizing can be seen in the long tradition of Hollywood movies dealing with U.S. history, from the 1900s until the present.

64. The dominant racist framing held in white minds encompasses much more than anti-black views. There is also the pro-white subframe. Discuss the pro-white subframe in terms of common images of white superiority and white virtue that recur in Hollywood films.

65. Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey write: “Seen comprehensively, all the mental images, prejudiced attitudes, stereotypes, sincere fictions, emotions, racist explanations, and rationalizations that link to systemic racism make up a white racial frame, a racist worldview, one deeply imbedded in the dominant U.S. culture and institutions. The system of racism is not something that only affects Americans of color, for it is central to the lives of white Americans as well. It determines how whites think about themselves, their ideals, and their country.” Illustrate what Feagin and Ducey mean.

66. Discuss how today, many white media analysts, other commentators, and conservative political officials view “Western civilization” as under threat from groups that are not white or European. Be sure to include fear of immigrants of color that was conspicuous amongst elite and non-elite whites during the 2016 electoral campaign of Republican Donald Trump.

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