Exam 4: Contemporary Racial Framing: White Americans

Among the basic impediments that hinder most whites from embracing an alternative and authentic liberty-and-justice framing of society is their lack of empathy for people of color. Systemic racism involves social alexithymia, which is the learned inability of most whites to understand or to want to understand the lived experiences of people of color. Meaningful transformation is possible but it is not easy and typically involves at least three stages: sympathy, empathy, and autopathy. Drawing on examples from Chapter 4, illustrate each of the three stages. i. The preliminary stage, sympathy, is the most common but is limited. It customarily involves a readiness on the part of whites to set aside some racist stereotypes, images, and hostility in favor of a responsive, if mutable curiosity, regarding the negative experiences of racialized others. ii. Empathy is a higher stage of transformation, in that it necessitates a more advanced capacity to consistently cast-off distancing stereotypes and other white-racist framing. It requires a conscious and continuous ability to see and feel some of the pain suffered by the racially oppressed. iii. Autopathy, the most advanced of the stages, occurs only when a white person consciously puts themselves into the racist world of the oppressed, even if limitedly. At this juncture, not only do whites experience racist hostility from other whites but they also endure secondary racial pain, most typically when they become intimates of people of color (e.g., parents, partners, friends). As a consequence, they directly and regularly witness what it means to be a victim of white racism.

Drawing on the "welfare queen" as enduring white mythology, explain how the white racial frame operates, especially how it buttresses the image of white virtue and privilege.

This theory suggests that viewers of TV seem to believe that the world created by television is an accurate depiction of the real world.

Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey write: "Responses to opinion surveys on racial matters are often superficial." Explain what they mean.

Many whites have disparaged the innovative music that has often come out of black communities, such as jazz in the early decades of the twentieth century, or rap music in recent decades.

When whites perceive someone to fit their internalized criteria for blackness - which can be skin color, other physical characteristics, or speech - their minds may generate negative attitudes or images, and they may act according to those negative attitudes or images. Possible responses include:

Explain how findings from Implicit Association Tests (IAT) and tests using brain scans suggests that black photos and visages generate not only cognitive stereotyping in white minds but also racialized emotions.

Whites-in-blackface minstrel shows included _____________.

Does racist language around new products and product presentations still persist? Explain by example and also by addressing how in capitalistic societies like the U.S., consumerism is based not only on the consumption of material goods but also on the consumption of important social beliefs, images, and narratives, which have long included substantial and essential elements from the dominant racial frame.

What is laissez-faire racism?

An examination of news stories in Pittsburgh's newspapers and television media found that everyday quality-of-life issues involving black males in such areas as the arts, education, employment, and leadership received far more attention than reports on African American males and crime.

What impact, if any, does the mainstream media have on white's fearfulness of black men and other negative images of black men and black women?

Young white children regularly use white racial framing to define themselves as white.

Racism plays out somewhat differently for key gender groups within the African American population. Drawing on images of black women and what scholars call intersectionality, explain.

Because of the racial demography and spatial ecology of everyday life, the majority of blacks spend much more time interacting with whites than the majority of whites spend interacting with blacks.

Explain how anti-black racism is deeply imbedded in spoken and written English, including in code words and color words and phrases that were not originally crafted as intentionally racist.

Utilizing 350 white respondents in two national surveys, researchers found that:

While other racial groups are periodically targeted, verbal and other attacks on them are not nearly as numerous as on ____________, according to Joe Feagin's and Leslie Picca's study of whites-only backstage settings.

Sociologist Charles Gallagher studied whites' substantial overestimation of the size and proportion of the black population. His findings include all the following EXCEPT:

Trace white people's attitudes about black laziness, in terms of the white racial frame's pro-white subframe and the anti-others subframes, from slavery to today.