The White Racial Frame

Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing

Joe R. Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000071450
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sulle minoranze

In this book sociologist Joe Feagin extends the systemic racism framework in previous Routledge books by developing an innovative concept, the white racial frame. Now more than four centuries old, this white racial frame encompasses not only the stereotyping, bigotry, and racist ideology emphasized in other theories of "race, " but also the visual images, array of emotions, sounds of accented language, interlinking interpretations and narratives, and inclinations to discriminate that are central to the frame's everyday operations. Deeply imbedded in American minds and institutions, this white racial frame has for centuries functioned as a broad worldview, one essential to the routine legitimation, scripting, and maintenance of systemic racism in the United States. Here Feagin examines how and why this white racial frame emerged in North America, how and why it has evolved socially over time, which racial groups are framed within it, how it has operated in the past and present for both white Americans and Americans of color, and how the latter have long responded with strategies of resistance that include enduring counter-frames. In this third edition, Feagin has included much new data from many recent research studies on framing issues related to white, black, Native, Latino/a, and Asian Americans, and on society generally. The book also includes a more extensive discussion of the impact of the white frame on popular culture, including on video games, movies, and television programs, as well as a discussion of the white racial frame's significant impacts on public policymaking on immigration, the environment, health care, and crime and imprisonment issues.

Chapter 1

The White Racial Frame

The better we know our racial past, the better we know our racial present. The U.S. is a fairly young country, just over 400 years old if we date its beginning from Jamestown’s settlement. For much of this history, extreme oppression in the form of slavery and legal segregation was our foundational reality. The first successful English colony was founded at Jamestown in 1607, and in 1619 the first enslaved Africans were purchased there by English colonists from a Dutch-flagged pirate ship. It was only 350 years from that year 1619 to the year 1969, the year the last major civil rights law was put into effect, officially ending legal Jim Crow segregation. Few people realize that for most of our history we were a country grounded in, and greatly shaped by, extensive slavery and legal racial segregation.

In terms of time and space, we are today not far from our famous “founding fathers.” There have been just three long human lifetimes since the 1776 Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, a document principally authored by the prominent slaveholder Thomas Jefferson. We are just two long human lifetimes from the 13th amendment (1865) to the U.S. Constitution that ended two-plus centuries of human slavery. And we are one long human lifetime from the Jim Crow era when segregationist mobs brutally lynched African Americans and other Americans of color, and when many whites, including Supreme Court justices and Senators, were members of the Ku Klux Klan, the world’s oldest violence-oriented white supremacist group. For a bit more than five decades, we have been an officially “free” country without large-scale legal discrimination. Certainly, that is not enough time for this country to eradicate the great and deep structural impacts of three and a half centuries of extreme racial oppression that preceded the current era. Much social science analysis of major aspects of this society today reveals the continuing impact and great significance of the systemic racism created by these centuries of extreme oppression.

In its geographical patterns the twenty-first century United States demonstrates the impact of this oppressive past. Even a brief study of the demographic map reveals that a substantial majority of African Americans today live in just fifteen of the fifty U.S. states—and very disproportionately in southern and border states. In these states, as elsewhere, the majority of these truly “old stock” Americans reside in relatively segregated areas of towns and cities. Why is this segregated residential pattern still the reality in what is often termed an “advanced democracy”? The answer lies in centuries of slavery, legal segregation, and contemporary racial discrimination that have set firmly in place and maintained many of this country’s important geographical realities.

In a great many cases, these racially segregated areas and geographical dividing lines are not recent creations, but have been shaped by white decisionmakers’ actions over a long period of time. Consider too that these distinctive areal patterns signal much more than information about our geographical realities, for they have many serious consequences for much that goes on in society. We can see this, to take one major example, in the racially polarized voting patterns for presidential elections so far in the twenty-first century.

Well into this century, racial segregation and separation along the color line are still a major part of our physical and psychic geography. Racial separation routinely affects the ways in which white Americans frame U.S. society, especially on racial matters. The evidence of white denial and ignorance of the reality of racial oppression is substantial. For example, one recent Gallup national survey found that black respondents were much more likely to view black people as suffering local discrimination than did white respondents. About 77 percent said this was true in regard to local policing, as compared to 45 percent of whites. This racial differential was also found in views of anti-black discrimination while shopping downtown (59 percent versus 25 percent), in the workplace (60 percent versus 22 percent), in restaurants and theaters (50 percent versus 22 percent), and in dealing with hospitals and doctors (49 percent versus 17 percent).¹ A great many white Americans are out of touch with the everyday experiences of black Americans.

One major goal of this book is to examine why so many whites often believe what is in fact not true about important racial realities. When insisting on apparently sincere fictions about the life conditions of African Americans and other Americans of color, many whites exhibit collective denial in believing what is demonstrably untrue.

A principal reason for these strong views is the persisting white racial frame. As I noted in the Introduction, this dominant frame is an overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate. Over time these aspects become imbedded in most whites’ character structure, to varying degrees. For centuries, it has been a dominant and foundational frame from which an overwhelming majority of white Americans—as well as many other people seeking to conform to white norms and perspectives—view our still highly racialized society.

Mainstream Social Science: The Need for a Broader Paradigm

The term and concept of the white racial frame is much more useful in making sense of racism’s patterns and reality than, for example, vague terminology assessing whether a person is “racist” or “biased.” For example, in mid-2019, after President Trump tweeted his racist views of several women of color in the U.S. Congress and also of other people of color, one major pollster explicitly asked respondents if they thought “Trump is racist.” Some 51 percent said “yes,” while 45 percent said “no.” (Black and Hispanic respondents were much more likely than whites to say “yes” to this question.)² One problem with this opinion poll question is that it is vague and implies that a “racist” white person is only someone with a few specific racist beliefs directed at people of color, beliefs that make them distinctive from other whites. However, this is much too restrictive in its view of racist framing. Trump has long demonstrated a broad racist framing of black Americans and other people of color. And his comments on Twitter that generated this poll revealed several key aspects of the dominant white racial frame, not just a few biases. For example, in commenting on people of color, here and elsewhere over the decades, Trump has usually operated out of the pro-white center of the white frame, asserting his and other whites’ virtuousness as well as negatively disparaging people of color.

Traditional social science and other mainstream academic and popular analysis has mostly portrayed U.S. racism as mainly a matter of racial “prejudice,” “bias,” and “stereotyping”—of racial attitudes directed at outgroups that indicate an ethnocentric view of the world and incline individuals to take part in bigotry-generated discrimination. Much research on racial matters continues to emphasize the prejudice and bias terminology and approach in assessing what are often termed racial “disparities,” a common term for inequalities. These concepts, though useful, are far from sufficient to assess and understand the foundational and systemic racism of the United States. We need more powerful concepts like systemic racism and the white racial frame that enable us to move beyond the limitations of conventional social scientific approaches. Traditional bias-type approaches do not capture or explain the deep structural realities of this society’s racial oppression in the past or present.

The dominant paradigm of an established science can make it hard for scientists to move in a major new direction in thinking or research. Innovative views of society are often screened for conformity to preferences of powerful decisionmakers in academia or society generally. This vetting and validation process is implemented by research-granting agencies, faculty advisors in academic programs, promotion reviews, and media or other public criticism of scholars who significantly deviate.³ For this reason, many racial realities of this society have never been sufficiently researched by social scientists. Ironically, U.S. social scientists who analyze societies overseas frequently accent the importance of uncovering hidden empirical realities and concealing myths of those societies, yet they or their colleagues are frequently reluctant to do similar in-depth research analysis of their home society.⁴

Since the full emergence of the social sciences in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainstream social scientists have periodically developed influential theories and concepts designed to interpret racial and ethnic “relations” in this society. These mostly white mainstream analysts have historically included such prominent, discipline-defining scholars as Robert E. Park, Gunnar Myrdal, and Milton Gordon. These influential scholars and their white colleagues have usually had difficulty in viewing U.S. society from any but a white, albeit often liberal, racial framing. Moreover, over more recent decades the analytical perspectives and much conceptual terminology of mainstream researchers like Park, Myrdal, and Gordon, though periodically revised, have continued to influence the way that many social analysts have viewed and researched important U.S. racial issues.⁵

The Limits of Individualistic Theories

While mainstream “race relations” theories and concepts have provided handy interpretive tools for understanding numerous aspects of racial oppression, they have limitations and carry hidden assumptions that can trap analysts into a limited understanding of racial inequalities and discrimination patterns. Included among these are traditional concepts such as intolerance, bias, prejudice, stereotype, race, ethnicity, assimilation, and bigotry-generated discrimination. These concepts have been widely used, and are frequently valuable, but they do not provide the essential array of conceptual tools necessary to make full sense of a highly racialized society like the United States.

These conventional analytical concepts tend to be used in decontextualized and non-systemic ways. Even a quick look at today’s social science journals and textbooks reveals the frequency and limitations of these commonplace concepts. Many analysts who use them tend to view racial inequality as just one of numerous “social problems.” Social problems textbooks dealing with racial issues often have a section on something like the U.S. “race problem,” as do other textbooks such as those used in law school courses on racial issues. This “problem” view is similar to the cancer view of racism, in that the problem is considered to be an abnormality in an otherwise healthy system.⁶ Such an approach typically views the race problem as not foundational to society, and often as gradually disappearing as a result of increasing modernity. Thus, one common approach in conventional analyses is to view historical or contemporary acts of discrimination as determined by individual bias or concern for views of bigoted others. This bigot-causes-discrimination view is, like other mainstream views, generally oriented to individual or small-group processes and does not substantially examine the deep structural foundation in which such acts of racial discrimination are regularly imbedded.⁷

Classical Social Scientists: Trapped in the Eurocentric Context

The habit of not thinking realistically and deeply about a country’s undergirding racial structure extends well beyond U.S. social scientists, past or present, to prominent figures in the long tradition of Western social science. Consider the still influential intellectual giants of the Western tradition such as Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. They loom large in much contemporary Western social science. Three were Jewish and personally familiar with European anti-Semitism. Several gave some analytical attention to that anti-Semitism, yet they provided brief or no such attention to the systems of racial oppression that conspicuously targeted indigenous and African-origin peoples within Western countries’ growing colonial spheres. Not one assessed in depth the extreme racialized oppression that played out in front of them as a central aspect of European imperialism and colonialism. Even Karl Marx, a critic of class oppression who knew Western history well, never offered a sustained analysis of the highly racialized character of the colonizing efforts overseas by Western governments and private capitalistic enterprises. The widespread omission of a serious analysis of Western racial expansion and oppression, and the consequent racialized social structures, is striking given how fundamental these processes and structures have long been to the prosperity and global dominance of major Western countries.

Historically, these influential social science analysts have been European or European American. They have prized European civilization over that of other continents, and characteristically viewed Western racial matters from an educated version of the dominant white frame, which I explain fully in the next section. For the most part, they were handicapped by the fact that they mostly thought out of the dominant racial framing that most European Americans and Europeans at various class levels have used for several centuries.

Take the example of Max Weber, who died in the early twentieth century but has had a lasting impact on Western social science to the present day. Like other social scientists of his era, he held to the tenets of blatant biological racism, a view that infected his historical and geopolitical arguments, yet one that almost never gets critically discussed in textbooks and empirical analyses that use his analytical concepts. For instance, Weber wrote unreflectively of the “hereditary hysteria” of Asian Indians, of Africans as genetically incapable of factory work, and of Chinese as slow in intelligence and docile, with these traits viewed as shaped by biology. As with most European scientists, central to Weber’s work was the idea of Western “rationality,” which he viewed as having hereditary grounding. Western capitalism had evolved through the process of “modernization,” which Weber and his peers contrasted to the “traditionalism” of “Oriental” civilizations. Weber held to the Eurocentric view that European capitalism was an “intellectual progression, an ascent of human ‘rationality,’ meaning intellect and ethics” from ancient society to modern society. Beyond Europe, other countries were viewed as to some degree backward. Edward Said has described this as an id...