Exam 3: The White Racial Frame- a Social Force

An early analyst noted that the modern racist perspective did not arise out of some "abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups," but rather grew out of the exploitative relationships of colonialism. Explain.

Drawing on examples from Chapter 3, illustrate how white defensiveness about systemic racism is seen today in numerous assertions that the United States is a "post-racial" society.

What is white fragility?

Discuss incidents of elite whites combatting the counter-framed insights and actions of slave rebellions, abolitionist movements, and civil rights movements.

Challenge the argument that "race was, from its inception, a folk classification, a product of popular beliefs about human differences."

Before he became president, __________ wrote in Good Housekeeping magazine, "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides."

The constitutional scholar Derrick Bell suggested that, historically, those in the white elite have acted to improve the conditions of black Americans only when whites themselves can benefit in the process, what he termed the process of racial-group __________.

In the first naturalization law in ______, the new U.S. Congress made the earliest political statement on citizenship.

In the early ________ century, English American colonists first used terms like "Christians" for themselves and "negroes" for Africans and African Americans.

Writing of mixed-ancestry Americans, Thomas Jefferson remarked that white "amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country … can innocently consent."

Discuss the parallels between Lothrop Stoddard's views and some white political leaders and commentators today.

Given increasing immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from non-European countries, white male government officials gave much attention to who was, or was not, "white." Explain how this focus is evocative of present-day white racial framing.

In his extraordinarily influential writings, the English scientist Charles Darwin applied the important evolutionary idea of "natural selection" ONLY to animal development, NOT to the development of human "races."

In 1923 ____________, a Princeton psychologist who would later play a central role in developing college entrance tests, argued pugnaciously for the intellectual inferiority of various racial groups, using data from psychometric tests given to World War I draftees.

_______________ can be seen in the images of Hollywood movies including Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939). In such movies, there is a persistence across time in representations of the ideal white American self, which is constructed as dominant, courageous, genial, sympathetic, strong, and generous.

Discuss how with the demise of legal segregation from the 1950s to the 1970s, real racial equality was not on the agenda of societal change for most whites as the dominant white racial frame continued to incorporate many of its old anti-black and other racist features.

Teleological racism is:

From the 1600s to the 1800s, many court decisions revealed the centrality of slavery to the newly created U.S.

Explain how fear is central to the white-racist framing woven through the system of anti-black oppression.

W.E.B. Du Bois forwarded the theory of interest convergence, arguing that white people will support racial justice only when they believe there is something in it for them, when there is a "convergence" between their interests and racial justice.