The White Racial Frame

Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing

Joe R. Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135127640
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book Joe Feagin extends the systemic racism framework in previous Routledge books by developing an innovative concept, the white racial frame. Now 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 still 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 in the 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 new edition, Feagin has included much new interview material and other data from recent research studies on framing issues related to white, black, Latino, and Asian Americans, and on society generally. The book also includes a new discussion of the impact of the white frame on popular culture, including on movies, video games, and television programs as well as a discussion of the white racial frame's significant impacts on public policymaking, 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 United States 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 racial 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 Africans were purchased there by English colonists from a Dutch-flagged slave ship. It was exactly 350 years from 1619 to 1969, the year the last major civil rights law went into effect officially ending legal segregation. Few people realize that for most of our history we were a country grounded in, and greatly shaped by, extensive slavery and legal 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 only one human lifetime from the 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 four 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.

Let us consider briefly some spatial impacts. 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 “old stock” Americans reside in relatively segregated areas of towns and cities. In many cities there are still the infamous railroad tracks, as well as major highways, that divide them into communities of mostly whites and communities of mostly people of color. Why is this segregated residential pattern still the reality in what is 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 this country's important geographical contours.

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 clearly, to take one example, in the racially polarized voting patterns for the landmark 2008 election noted in the Preface.

Well into this twenty-first century, racial segregation and separation along the color line are very much a major part of our psychic geography. Racial separation affects the ways in which white Americans view society, especially on racial matters. The evidence of white denial and ignorance of the reality of U.S. racism is substantial. For example, one national survey of 779 whites found that 61 percent viewed the average black person as having health care access at least equal to that of the average white person. Yet, research data show whites are far more likely to have good health insurance and to get adequate medical care than black Americans. About half the white respondents felt that black Americans had a level of education similar to or better than that of whites. Half the white respondents felt that, on average, whites and blacks are about as well off in the jobs they hold. Once again, the research data show that neither view is accurate. When the results of several such questions were combined, 70 percent of whites were found to hold one or more erroneous beliefs about important white-black differentials in life conditions. Only one in five whites evaluated the current societal situation accurately on a question about how much discrimination African Americans faced. The majority of whites are willfully ignorant or misinformed when it comes to understanding the difficult life conditions that African Americans and other Americans of color face today. Interestingly, in another survey white respondents were asked if they “often have sympathy for blacks” and again if they “often feel admiration for blacks.” Only 5 percent of whites said yes to both questions.¹

One goal of this book is to examine why so many whites believe what is in fact not true about important racial realities. In insisting on apparently sincere fictions about life conditions of African Americans and other Americans of color, a great many whites exhibit serious collective denial in believing what is demonstrably untrue. The principal reason for these strong racialized views is the white racial frame. As I noted in the Preface, 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. For centuries now, it has been a dominant and foundational frame from which a substantial majority of white Americans–as well as many others accepting or seeking to conform to white norms and perspectives–view our still highly racialized society.

Mainstream Social Science: The Need for a New Paradigm

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 recent 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, although certainly useful, are far from sufficient to assess and explain the foundational and systemic racism of the United States. We need more powerful concepts like systemic racism the white racial frame that enable us to move beyond the limitations of conventional scientific approaches. Traditional 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 makes it hard for scientists to move in a major new direction in thinking or research. Most scientists stay mostly inside the dominant paradigmatic “box” because of concern for their careers or accepted scientific constraints. One important barrier to developing new social science paradigms is that new views of society are regularly screened for conformity to preferences of elite decision-makers in academia or in 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.²

Today, most mainstream social science analysis of racial matters is undertaken and accepted because it more or less conforms to the preferences of most elite decisionmakers. For this reason, many racial realities of this society have rarely or never been intensively researched by social scientists. Ironically, U.S. social scientists who research societies overseas often accent the importance of uncovering hidden empirical realities and concealing myths of those societies, yet are frequently reluctant to do similar in-depth research on and analysis of their home society.³

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 scholars as Robert E. Park, Gunnar Myrdal, and Milton Gordon. These influential scholars and their 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 elaborated and revised, have continued to significantly influence the way that a majority of social scientists and other researchers have viewed and researched important racial issues.⁴

Certainly, the mainstream “race relations” theories and concepts have provided handy interpretive tools for understanding numerous aspects of racial oppression, but they also have significant limitations and carry hidden assumptions that frequently trap analysts into a limited understanding of racial inequalities and patterns. Included among these are traditional concepts such as bigotry, bias, prejudice, stereotype, race, ethnicity, assimilation, and bigotry-generated discrimination. These concepts have been widely used, and are frequently valuable, but do not provide the essential array of conceptual tools necessary to make sense out 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 or 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 Constitution and 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.⁵ Such an approach typically views the race problem as not foundational to society, but as temporary and gradually disappearing as a result perhaps 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 discrimination are imbedded.⁶

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 numerous 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 of Jewish background and were personally familiar with European anti-Semitism. Several gave some attention to that anti-Semitism, yet they provided brief or no analytical attention to the systems of racial oppression that operated conspicuously within Western countries' growing imperial and colonial spheres during their lifetimes. Not one assessed in significant 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, never offered a sustained analysis of the highly racialized character of the colonizing adventures overseas by Western governments and capitalistic enterprises. The widespread omission of a serious and sustained analysis of Western racial expansion and oppression, and the consequent racialized social structures, is striking given how fundamental these processes and structures have been to the prosperity and global dominance of major Western countries, now for centuries.

Historically, these influential social science analysts have been European or European American. These analysts have generally 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, these theorists and analysts have been handicapped by the fact that they typically have thought out of the dominant racial framing that most European Americans and Europeans at all class levels have used now for several centuries.

Take the example of Max Weber, who died in the early twentieth century but has had a great impact on Western social science ever since. 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 to this day use his analytical concepts. 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.⁷ Beyond Europe, other countries were viewed as to some degree backward. Edward Said has described this as an ideology of Orientalism, a Western-centered framing unable to see beyond Eurocentrism.⁸ Since the time of Weber, many Western social scientists assessing European industrialization and capitalism have continued to accent European superiority in modernity.

To take a more recent example, consider the leading U.S. social theorist, Talcott Parsons. Parsons viewed U.S. racism as an anachronism representative of a premodernist mode of thinking and likely to be dissolved with more industrialization and modernization. Even a scholar who probed deeply into Western civilization was unable to see the racialized “water” in which he metaphorically swam, the water of a sophisticated white framing of Western societies.⁹ That frame and the racial oppression it aggressively rationalizes have always been much more than a “premodern survival” attached to an otherwise advanced society. The system of white-imposed racism and its rationalizing frame have long been part of U.S. foundational realities, yet not one major white theorist in the U.S. social science canon has substantially analyzed and understood well that major foundation.

Consider too that the idea of Western civilization's modernity, which includes a superior rationality, has long been important in Western analysis, from Max Weber's time to the present. The term “modernity” has functioned as social science shorthand for industrial and technological civilization, for societies shaped by the views that humans should actively transform physical environments, that market economies are best, and that bureaucratized nation-states are necessary for societal well-being.¹⁰ Yet this idea of modernity emerged about the same time as the white framing that, since at least the 1600s, has rationalized racial oppression in North America and elsewhere. The concept of “advanced Western civilization” grew out of the European and European American history of imperialistic subordination of peoples of color and often within the social crucibles of slavery and genocide.

According to many contemporary analysts, modern Western societies supposedly have proceeded well beyond the premodern impulses of group irrationality, superstition, and primitive violence. Yet European enslavement of Africans in North America and European-generated genocides targeting indigenous peoples across the globe, which operated openly until a century or so ago, did not result from premodern violent impulses somehow breaking through modernity. Instead, these actions did, and do, constitute the economic and cultural foundations of Western modernity–with its advanced technologies, accent on Western-controlled markets, developed nation-states, and overseas military operations aimed at maintaining Western dominance. Racial oppression and its rationalizing frame have long been central to modern Western societies, to the present day.

The White-Centered Perspectives of Contemporary Social Scientists

Today, one observes the...