The White Racial Frame 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 ste- reotyping, 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 signififi cant impacts on public policymaking on immigration, the environment, health care, and crime and imprisonment issues. Joe R. Feagin is Ella C. McFadden Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has done much research on racism and sexism issues for forty-nine years and has served as the Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has written fifi fty-nine scholarly books and more than 200 scholarly articles in his research areas, and one of his books (Ghetto Revolts) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His recent books include Systemic Racism (Routledge 2006) andWhite Party, White Governmentt (Routledge 2012). He is the 2006 recipient of a Harvard alumni association’s lifetime achievement award and was the 1999–2000 president of the American Sociological Association. This page intentionally left blank The White Racial Frame Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing Second Edition Joe R. Feagin Second edition fifi rst published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Joseph R. Feagin to be identifified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2009 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Feagin, Joe R. The white racial frame : centuries of racial framing and counter- framing / Joe R. Feagin. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United States—Race relations. 2. Race discrimination—United States. 3. African-Americans—United States—Social conditions. 4. African- Americans—United States—Public opinion. 5. Whites—United States—Attitudes. I. Title. E184.A1F395 2013 305.800973—dc23 2012031133 ISBN: 978-0-415-65761-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-63522-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-07682-8 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by Refifi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xv 1 The White Racial Frame 1 2 Building the Racist Foundation: Colonialism, Genocide, and Slavery 23 3 Creating a White Racial Frame: The First Century 39 4 Extending the White Frame: The Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth Century 59 5 The Contemporary White Racial Frame 89 6 The Frame in Everyday Operation 121 7 The Frame in InstitutionalOperation: Bureaucratization of Oppression 141 8 Counter-Framing: Americans of Color 163 9 Toward a Truly Multiracial Democracy: Thinking and Acting Outside the White Frame 199 Suggestions for Further Reading 227 Notes 229 Index 253 v This page intentionally left blank Preface In November 2008, more than two centuries after this country’s founding, Senator Barack Obama became the fifi rst American of color to win the U.S. presidency. He won nearly 53 percent of the national vote, compared to about 46 percent for his white opponent, Senator John McCain. Since Obama’s election, the increase in emphasis on the United States being post-racial has been dramatic, especially among whites and in the mainstream media. Like many media outlets, the national business newspaper the Wall Street Journal, framed Barack Obama’s election as a great tribute to how democratic and non-racist the United States now is: A man of mixed race has now reached the pinnacle of U.S. power only two generations since the end of Jim Crow. This is a tribute to American opportunity, and it is something that has never happened in another Western democracy—notwithstanding European condescension about “racist” America.1 After the assertion of moral superiority over Europe, this white-framed editorial added: “One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country. Mr. Obama has a special obligation to help do so.”2 Writing from a common white viewpoint, this editorial writer called on President-elect Obama to lead an effort to kill the supposed “myth of racism.” But did this important election really signal a major decline in U.S. racism? Even the election itself was revealing on this score. While it was not vii viii • Preface as close as the two previous presidential elections, it was close enough that a shift of just 4 percent or so of the total voters from Obama to McCain would have given McCain a presidential victory. Signififi cantly, one recent social science study examined the many racially charged Internet searches by people for the word “nigger” for most of the 200 U.S. media markets in 2008, and compared those searches (as a proxy for anti-black prejudice) to an area’s votes for Obama. The researcher suggests from these data on racially charged searches that candidate Obama likely lost a signifificant percentage of 2008 white voters because he was black.3 Indeed, if it had only been up to white voters in 2008, Senator McCain would have become the 44th U.S. president, for he won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote nationally, and a substantial majority of white voters in thirty-two of the fifi fty states. In contrast, more than two thirds of voters of color voted for Senator Obama.4 The United States came out of the 2008 presidential election as still quite racially polarized. Researchers have shown that about half of all the presi- dential votes cast in 2008 were in counties where Senator Obama or Senator McCain won by at least 20 percent of the total vote. The percentage of voters residing in these very polarized “landslide” counties grew substan- tially from 27 percent in 1976 to 48 percent in 2008. Even more striking was the racial polarization. Those counties where candidate McCain won with a landslide margin of 20 percent or more were overwhelmingly white, with the black and Latino voting age population averaging only a sixth of those counties’ populations. Where Obama won a county, in contrast, the black and Latino population averaged about 43 percent of the voting age population. Paralleling this voter polarization, moreover, was the continu- ing and extensive residential and school segregation that is revealed in much research on U.S. towns and cities.5 Even with the election of the fifi rst African American president in 2008, the harsh realities of institutional racism in major sectors of U.S. society have remained quite evident to the present day. Today, those who do this signififi cant research and analysis of U.S. racial patterns frequently make use of a disease metaphor, such as the idea that racism is a “cancer” in the “body” of society. In a recent search for phrases like “racism is a cancer” or the “cancer of racism” in published research papers and popular articles, I found thousands of uses of this strong metaphor. The commonplace idea is that racism is an unhealthy social condition, one stemming from pathogenic conditions in an otherwise healthy societal body. Yet, this view is inadequate. Our society was built from the beginning with racial oppression as a central part of its societal structure. In this sense, there never was a “healthy” societal body that the cancer of racism could invade. Preface • ix A better metaphor is that of white-imposed racism as an important part of the structural “foundation” of the U.S. “house.” Racial oppression was not added later on in the development of this society, but was the foundation of the original colonial and U.S. social systems, and it still remains as a U.S. foundation. This structural-foundation metaphor relates much better to the historical and contemporary reality of this country. I have searched hundreds of relevant scholarly papers and many Internet websites for phrases like “racial foundation of the United States,” the “country’s racial foundation,” and the “nation’s racial foundation,” and not one such phrase appeared other than my own. In light of the historical and contemporary data assessed throughout this book, this structural-foundation metaphor captures the realities of this country’s racism, past and present, better than a disease metaphor. This societal reality is signififi cantly different from that of other leading industrialized countries in the West. Countries like Great Britain and France were central to centuries of European colonialism, including the Atlantic slave trade and slave plantations in the Americas, but their early and later growth as nations was not built directly on an internal labor force of enslaved Africans or on local lands stolen by recent conquests of indigenous people. Knowing North American racial history is important for making sense out of the current realities of this society. For many years, I have been researching this history in an attempt to analyze accurately the major impacts on U.S. culture and institutions of this country’s foundation in systemic racism. The United States is a country with systemic racial oppression—centuries of genocide, about 246 years of slavery, and about ninety years of Jim Crow, altogether most of our history. In this book I am especially inflfl uenced by the long tradition of black countersystem analysis—such as that of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Ture, Derrick Bell, and Angela Davis—that has regularly highlighted the institutional and systemic character of racial oppression over these centuries. Following in this tradition, and drawing on others critically analyzing societal oppression, we will examine here numerous lasting legacies of past racial oppression in our contemporary patterns of racism. We will assess the evidence of systemic racism in the colonial and U.S. economic, legal, and political systems, to the present day. As in the past, systemic racism today includes: 1. the complex array of recurring exploitative, discriminatory, and other oppressive white practices targeting Americans of color; 2. the institutionalized economic and other social resource inequalities along racial lines (the racial hierarchy); and