The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing [Paperback]

Joe R. Feagin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 2009 | ISBN-10: 041599439X | ISBN-13: 978-0415994392 | Edition: 1

In this book Joe R. Feagin extends the systemic racism framework by developing an innovative new concept, the white racial frame. Now four centuries-old, this white racial frame encompasses not only the stereotyping, bigotry, and racist ideology accented in other theories of "race," but also the visual images, array of emotions, sounds of language, interlinking interpretations, and inclinations to discriminate that are still central to the frame’s everyday operation.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Joe Feagin's book could not be more timely or important. The "white racial frame" is an analytic tool of great precision, deployed here both for a fresh and challenging look at American history, and for exciting proposals for more productive forms of education about race and racism."—Jane H. Hill, Anthropology, Emerita University of Arizona

"With expert clarity Joe Feagin traces the development of "the white racial frame," a concept that transcends traditional notions of racial ideology, explicating how white normalizing cognitive processes interact with imagery and emotion, inclinations and action."—Wendy L. Moore, Sociology, Texas A&M University  

About the Author

Joe R. Feagin is Ella C. McFadden Professor at Texas A & M University. Feagin has done research on racism and sexism issues for forty-five years and has served as the Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has written 54 scholarly books and nearly 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) and Two Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage (Routledge 2007). He is the 2006 recipient of a Harvard Alumni Association lifetime achievement award and was the 1999-2000 president of the American Sociological Association.

Product Details

• Paperback: 10 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (July 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 041599439X
• ISBN-13: 978-0415994392
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #52 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Emigration & Immigration
  • #83 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Specific Demographics > Minority Studies

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars speaking truth to power October 13, 2009

By Sean Elias

Format:Paperback

Joe R. Feagin's The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (White Racial Frame) exposes in greater detail the centuries-old racist ideas and practices of people of European descent (i.e., whites) that shaped the racially-segregated, color-coded US society Americans live in today. This work builds on innovative concepts and theoretical frameworks generated in Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (2000/2009), Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (2006), as well as other studies of race in Feagin's long list of publications.

Feagin shows that the white racial frame is both a product and producer of whites' brute power and hegemonic dominance over people of color in shaping the modern world (i.e., slavery, colonization, and genocide). The frame might be viewed as the self-perpetuating racially-constructed motor of modernity. Feagin's theoretical understanding of the white racial frame exposes weaknesses in the most widely accepted theories of modernity, which focus on capitalism, state formation, scientific progress and developments of civilization and civil society. Theoretical construction of the white racial frame subsumes these explanations as by-products of whites' long history of exploitation, oppression and destruction of people of color. The frame is the source and foundational structure responsible for triggering the rapid rise of capitalism, states, scientific progress (whites had capital and time for science through living off slave labor and stolen natural resources of people of color) and civilization/civil societies.

As Feagin demonstrates, white wealth generated by capitalist production/consumption, white nation-states, technological advances of the West (i.e., white-controlled societies/states), and comforts and luxuries of "civilization"/"civil society" arise from and are inseparable from the stolen labor and land of people of color and the de-civilization and colonizing process (or white barbarity) targeting non-Westerners, that is, people of color. White Racial Frame makes clear that whites' economic power and social might did not so much come from their hard work, Protestant work ethic and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy, nor their proclaimed democratic principals and progressive, liberal social attitudes and behavior. Instead, whites' socio-economic power and Western "civilization" and "civil societies" result from whites' socio-economic disempowerment and barbarous subjugation or extermination of people of color.

Feagin's book presents an uncompromising---somber, but factual---sociological theory of race, race relations and racism in the US, one that does not shy away from the hard truths about the structures and forces that perpetuate whites' (abuse of) power, namely the white racial framing of the social world. Building on a rich black sociological tradition, Feagin provides evidence of whites' abusive, unjustly gained social and economic power, which most social scientists (including sociologists of race) avoid discussing. Like earlier black sociologists such as Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois and Oliver C. Cox and contemporary black sociologists like Robert Staples, Joyce Ladner and Tukufu Zuberi (to name only a few), Feagin exposes deep-seated mechanisms of white power, honestly and convincingly illustrating whites' age-old racist ideas and practices that maintain the white racial frame of power and privilege.

Joe Feagin is a straight-shooter in racial discourse. White Racial Frame is another sign that Feagin is not afraid to speak truthfully about whites' abuse of power, an intellectual virtue and example of quality scholarship that commands respect from those who teeter on hotly-debated questions concerning whites' role in shaping race, race relations and racism.