The white racial frame (1600s- ) is the frame through which White Americans and the whitewashed make sense of issues about race. It is made up of stereotypes, images, narratives, mythology, history that is played up, history that is played down, etc. It is expressed – and strengthened – through jokes, slurs, discrimination, institutions, heroes, holidays, hatred, Hollywood stereotypes, etc.
It is sociologist Joe R. Feagin’s take on the white lens.
The white racial frame makes sense of racial inequality in American society, excuses it, makes it seem “natural”, “fair”, even “post-racial”!
- It lies about how whites got so rich.
- It tells them that they are good people, more moral than ever before, that blacks and other people of colour are screwed up.
- It shapes institutions and is shaped by them.
- It shapes white thought and character.
- It is learned from parents, teachers, friends, the media, etc.
- It is ingrained into every person brought up as White American, from rednecks to senators to white liberal professors. It becomes like a second skin, one they are blind to.
It is profound and hard to shake: The changes after the Civil War and during the civil rights movement did not affect the deep structure of racism.
Compare:
By 1700 White American scientists, ministers, thinkers and leaders were already stereotyping blacks as:
- different looking in skin colour, hair and lips,
- disagreeable in smell,
- being like monkeys,
- unintelligent,
- uncivilized, alien, foreign,
- immoral, dangerous, given to crime,
- lazy,
- oversexed,
- ungrateful, rebellious,
- having disorganized families.
Whites were the opposite of all that, the model majority. These stereotypes were based not on close observation and study but on what excused keeping blacks as slaves, raping their women, breaking up their families, overworking them, keeping them like animals, etc.
In the 1990s, nearly 300 years later, a study of Taiwanese people who knew about Black Americans mainly from American film and television, found that they thought blacks were:
- lazy,
- unintelligent,
- criminal,
- violent,
- dirty,
- self-destructive,
- ugly.
While the white racial frame is pounded into the heads of Americans of colour through the media and schooling, Black, Latino, Asian and Native Americans each have their own counter-frames.
- White racial frame: Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Fareed Zakaria
- Counter-frame: Rev Jeremiah Wright
While the whitewashed use the white racial frame, most people of colour use both the white racial frame and a counter-frame.
The liberty-and-justice frame: Most white people do not have any racial counter-frame. But they do have the political liberty-and-justice frame they used to fight and overthrow the British, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It contradicts the white racial frame.
Blacks take that frame to its clear, anti-racist conclusions, but only a few whites do. Most whites go with the white racial frame and save liberty and justice for speeches. Barack Obama avoided it completely when he ran for president in 2008.
The good news: Anything that is learned can be unlearned.
The bad news: The white racial frame is deeply ingrained in white history, institutions and character.
Tomorrow: Counter-frames
Source: Joe R. Feagin, “The White Racial Frame” (2010).
See also:
- Racism Review – Feagin’s website. Good for those who want the sociology behind race in the news.
- colour-blind racism: the four frames – Another frame-based sociological take, that of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.
- political arguments – also uses the idea of frames
- The white lens
- Jeremiah Wright
- IAT: Implicit Association Test
- How white people think
- How White America got rich
Abagond, why are you messing with my boy, Fareed Zakaria
He finally got his own show and you want him to mess all that up by showing “all” his true feelings…
You see what happened to Soledad and Cenk Uygur when they started running their mouths.
There must be another category for black and brown people who play the game but know what’s up in America — who work at trying to “counter” ingrained white prejudice in their own way or in small increments (like Fareed)
He has his moments when he steps out of the “frame”:
Fareed @ “Then there is the ‘birther’ issue. I regard this as coded racism, frankly. I don’t think there’s any other word for it.”
but he knows who signs his Paycheck and he can’t jeopardize the only tool he has in bringing forth “Truth”
To put Fareed in the same category as that lost POS Clarence Thomas is an insult…
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I think public figures are “acting” to a certain degree. I think ppl like Fareed have to walk a tight line else risk being vilified. Actually, it is white people who can get away with calling out racism.
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Jefe,
and I guess that’s the problem, as this post demonstrates. white America doesn’t want to hear it (never have) from non-white people
and you have the truly delusion black people (David Webb) for them to trot out to show the white world: “there is such a thing as a good n’ger, see!” — even Michael Steele has his limits.
you have people like Fareed, who speaks in an up front manner but in such a way as to not “offend” anyone — but like with Obama, white racists will find a way to vilify him — There is no way to please them because the devil’s work is never done.
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Abagond loves to impose his prejudices on others. The post would be more honest if he switched the races.
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I always wondered about the oversexed thing. When it comes to over sex haven’t Europeans been on top of that. I mean if you look at Australia one of the problems that always crops up about them taking away Aboriginal kids was that many times the females were raped or force into sexual situation. Same in the case of Tasmania. Same with slavery in the States. Why we find that many white American’s have Native American genes and so on. In the over sexed department seems like many POC have a long way to catch up. I mean wasn’t Jefferson Davis wife Varina Banks Davis (Howell) description of black female slaves, I think she called them a harem?
I never understand what these people who say or write this oversexed stuff is talking about. Sex has been the one big issue of Victorian era’s mind but as you know it was always a problem for them. Maybe all those rules imposed on them by the upper class of that time period really warped the views of sex.
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@Linda,
So we need to recruit white people who can capture other white people’s attention.
what racial frame does Tim Wise use?
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An interesting and enlightening post.
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I don’t read much of F. Zakaria, how is he racist?
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@ King of Trouble
The oversex stuff Is them projecting again. And we couldn’t say that stuff about them, when a black newspaper called white women sexually loose they lynched them and random black ppl. There never was freedom of speech for us. They just call poc over sex yah more like over raped by the Europeans. It is their counter to raping ppl, oh no they weren’t raped it was a love affair or no they weren’t raped they like sex, so even no means yes to them.
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This thread has piqued my interest in Joe R. Feagan’s books. seeing how I have an interest in sociology. Racial and gender issues are especially interestin to me. I saw a couple of his books on Amazons and Good Reads. I would be especially interested how a white man of his age can be objective on these subjects. His books “Living With Racism ” looks like something I would read. I would like to know more of his perspectives and viewpoints. Compared to other sociologist of other ethnicities on these subjects. Thanks, Abagond for bringing this person of interest to my attention.
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*interesting*
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I’m one of those who doesn’t like to racialize people’s thoughts. There is not a “Black” way to think and a “White” way to think. Black people have the right to disagree with the majority of their ethnicity, and most of them do, on one point or another. But when they do, they are not “thinking White” they are just thinking. Individuals disagree and have differences of understandings on issues. You cannot colorize that.
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@ King: Your comment gives me pause. It is very introspective. I gave me something to think about. Thanks for this.
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*It gave me something to think about.
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From what I have been reading about Joe R. Feagin, White Racial Frame is a term he coined,while doing his research on systemic racism in America. In short what this is just how white America frames their racist stereotypes about Black Americans.
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@King
People are individuals first, but that fact does not preclude the context in which a given individual lives. There are Black thoughts and I am not referring to the piquant lyricist of The Roots.
Black thinking ponders double consciousness. Black thinking seeks ways to elevate the esteem of the Black community in a society that continually devalues Black worth.
Are we Blacks individuals with our own ideas and modes of expression? Absolutely! However, those ideas and expressions are still informed by our Blackness.
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[…] The white racial frame (1600s- ) is the frame through which White Americans and the whitewashed make sense of issues about race. It is made up of stereotypes, images, narratives, mythology, history… […]
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you won’t win king, best to just be quiet and listen to them. They are hate filled racists to the core.
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@Lwanda Magere
No one is suggesting that our ethno-cultural perspectives do not affect our thinking. But they do not define our thoughts. A Black person can have the same “thought” or idea as a non-Black person. A race does not own thought, and no member of a race owes his fealty to conform to a certain way of thinking.
But it especially becomes problematic when people feel that they can label dissenting thought within the diaspora as “non-black” because it disagrees with their own thinking. If the thought comes from a Black mind then who am I to say that the content of the idea is not Black? The person speaking the thought may have their own Black perspective and their own Black experiences. It is not up to me to try to define their experience based upon mine, or even upon that of the larger group.
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Abagond, have you seen this? (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/08/06/2419681/ohio-bus-discrimination/ )
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@TS: I feel like it went to sleep and woke up in 1953. We are going backwards in time in this society.
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Is profiling a symptom of the White Frame?
I found this article on profiling from a Canadian’s blog.
http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2013/08/why-we-profile.html
“Statistical probability is the wellspring of stereotypes. It is what pushes us to avoid snakes, spiders, and scorpions; it is why Swiss clocks, German cars, and Jewish lawyers are so sought after; it is why the global South continually tries to emigrate to the global North. Past performance is no guarantee of future success, warn the experts, but from our experience, we know it usually is.”
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Yes. Past performance is a good predictor of future behavior. For example, if a group of people repeatedly discriminated against, lied to and stole land from another group of people, it is safe to assume that they will continue to lie and steal in the future.
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King,
“I’m one of those who doesn’t like to racialize people’s thoughts. There is not a “Black” way to think and a “White” way to think. Black people have the right to disagree with the majority of their ethnicity, and most of them do, on one point or another. But when they do, they are not “thinking White” they are just thinking. Individuals disagree and have differences of understandings on issues. You cannot colorize that.”
Black people have the right to disagree. They also have the right to be wrong and to be white supremacists. If you subscribe to white supremacist thinking you are white supremacist no matter your skin color. Saying black people have the right to disagree is just a cop out. Your right to be an idiot doesn’t stop you from being wrong.
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@ Linda @ Ineedtoselectanameandstickwithit
Fareed Zakaria in “The Post-American World” (2008) wrote about the rise of the West, only barely mentioning slavery and making no direct reference to genocide. He speaks of parts of the world being “marked for use by Europe”. Wow. That is the white racial frame.
As we have seen with Obama, Oprah, Henry Louis Gates, Clarence Thomas, Juan Williams, even Melissa Harris-Perry and Al Sharpton on MSNBC and Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, you do not get to a large, white-owned platform without walking a fine line, without being “safe”, if not an outright Uncle Tom. Cenk Uygur and Rev Wright, bless their souls, refused to walk that fine line even though they could have.
I was happy when Obama was elected president. I was happy when Melissa Harris-Perry got her own show on MSNBC. Both times I thought, “At last, someone like me is up there!” It was like I was president, like I had my own television show. It was great! And both times, guess what – the crushing disillusion of seeing them walk that fine line and not achieving much beyond tokenism.
Both are object lessons in how White Americans live in a carefully crafted echo chamber. It is part of how the white racial frame works.
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@Abagond: I don’t think Melissa-Harris-Perry belongs in that group. I don’t agree with that.
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@Abagond: I think I understand what you are saying about walking the fine line. I think she speaks up about the racism in this country, but no, I don’t think they can tip their hand. But I understand what the white racial frame is about. Thanks for the enlightenment.
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^ mary
I notice a lot of black men put Melissa harris perry on their list of sell outs, I don’t really know why, but then again I don’t watch her show.
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@Mstoogood4yall: I didn’t know that. She doesn’t come across to me as a sellout. She speaks out about racial injustices in this country. I don’t get that she is a sellout. Now those black women on FOX, those are sellouts.
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Idk either, just conscious black men keep mentioning her, so i’m just wondering what I am missing that they see about her. The only things I heard a guy complain about on youtube was that she talks about white issues more than black issues. And that she talks bad about black men while up playing interracial segments.
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@mstoogood4yall: That’s not true, I have never heard her put down black men. I think she’s pretty objective. I don’t agree with that assement of her. You should watch the show for yourself to see if that’s true.
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You know what’s interesting to me? White people have this notion that black people — particularly black men — are dangerous brutes, lacking self control, decency and morals. Thieves, murderers, rapists, thugs, the lot of them. Yet…whenever you see a security guard, bodyguard, night watchman, doorman, attendant, caretaker, or some other person *engaged* to look after white folks and/or their property and possessions, who’s mostly performing those duties?
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I mean, how do they reconcile all that?
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Is there some sort of psychosis there? Is there some sort of mental illness that affects groups as a collective?
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Smh,
@Msgood & Mary,
Mostly the Black men that complain about the imaginary playing up of IRR by Black women are in fact wanting to have an IRR themselves..
Melissa Harris-Perry has been divorced from a Black man and is currently married to a Black man. They should also note that her parentage (white mother/Black father) is the very thing that they claim they have been kept away from engaging in…
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I suppose only thieves, murderers, rapists and thugs know how to deal with other thieves, murderers, rapists and thugs,
😛 😛 😛
Sorry, I’ll stop being funny.
You know, where I am located now (Hong Kong) it is common to see men with ethnic origins in South Asia (Indian, Pakistani or Nepalese) as security guards, night watchmen, doormen, attendants, caretakers, or some other person *engaged* to look after Chinese folks and/or their property and possessions, but it is exactly South Asians who are the target of many ethnic Chinese contempt – they feel the South Asians have low morals and are prone to crime, they don’t want to serve them, they don’t want to rent flats to them, they don’t want to work with them or let them hold postions with authority, taxis don’t want to pick them up.
It is curious that the persons held in contempt by the majority are the very ones engaged to provide low level security.
I have a theory. Since the actual thieves (not the imagined ones) tend to be Chinese, the ethnic South Asians cannot be bribed or swayed into NOT performing their duties. Maybe white Americans privately suspect that most actual thieves are probably whites, but blacks have no incentive to help white people be criminals.
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“Yet…whenever you see a security guard, bodyguard, night watchman, doorman, attendant, caretaker, or some other person *engaged* to look after white folks and/or their property and possessions, who’s mostly performing those duties?”
Someone working for min wage.
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Not only is Fareed Zakaria whitewashed but he’s also influenced by Hindutva ideology,
Soon after the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 he blamed “Pakistani terrorists” for carrying out the attack even before there was evidence, and he’s called Pakistan a rogue state, now he’s been proven wrong, since the Mumbai attacks haven been proven to be an inside job.
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/news/editorial/2013/07/16/6466.html
Fareed Zakaria used to write wine reviews, but after 9/11 he switched to writing about the geo-political situation in the Muslim world, he thought he talk about the middle east just because he’s a Brown Muslim.
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“Is there some sort of psychosis there? Is there some sort of mental illness that affects groups as a collective?”
**************
Grin & Bear It
James Baldwin had this to say:
“White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded – about themselves and about the world they live in. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.”
Lillian Smith in Killers of the Dream puts it this way:
“I knew that my old nurse who had cared for me through long months of illness, who had given me refuge when a little sister took my place as the baby of the family, who soothed, fed me, delighted me with her stories and games, let me fall asleep on her deep warm breast, was not worthy of the passionate love I felt for her but must be given instead a half-smiled-at affection similar to that which one feels for one’s dog.
I knew but I never believed it, that the deep respect I felt for her, the tenderness, the love, was a childish thing which every normal child outgrows, that such love begins with one’s toys and is discarded with them, and that somehow—though it seemed impossible to my agonized heart—I too, must outgrow these feelings. I learned to use a soft voice to oil my words of superiority. I learned to cheapen with tears and sentimental talk of “my old mammy” one of the profound relationships of my life. I learned the bitterest thing a child can learn: that the human relations I valued most were held cheap by the world I lived in.”
————————-
Yes, there’s a huge, gigantic WHITE cultural *psychosis* (disconnect) going on that whiteness at large refuses to examine or look at! As you probably know, whiteness, to the majority of white people is just – normal.
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I replaced the picture of Fareed Zakaria with one of Uncle Ruckus, who is a far more clear-cut (and better known) case of someone who uses the white racial frame. It also goes better with the post that will appear next.
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@ phobeprunelle: Thanks for the commentary on Melissa-Harris-Perry, I felt that was wrong to put her in the sellout commentary. I enjoy her MSNBC Sunday morning show.
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@ Matari
Great quotes! I knew the James Baldwin one but not the Lillian Smith one. Thanks!
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About Melissa Harris-Perry:
I like her show too. One of the few I watch more than once a month. Where else are you going to see Sean Bell’s widow, for example? On the other hand, she is an Obama cheerleader. As a professor, a person trained (we hope) in critical thought, that is not believable. It is one thing to defend Obama against racist attacks or even Republican ones, as any black Democrat would or should, quite another thing to be that uncritical of him.
Drones? Nothing. Gaza? Nothing. ERPA? Nothing. Criticism of the tepidness of Obama’s post-Zimmerman-verdict remarks? Nothing. At least nothing that I saw on her show.
Also, her panels are nothing but yes men, they all pretty much agree with her. They are intellectual sock puppets.
Some of this stuff seems to be common to all MSNBC hosts, not just her.
That said, she is nowhere near as bad as Clarence Thomas or any black person on Fox News. They are white racial frame all the way. She is not.
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@ Jefe
Interesting question. Most white allies use a liberty-and-justice frame: they take what Jefferson and Lincoln said seriously, not hypocritically or rhetorically like most whites.
Feagin talks at length about how white sociologists and political thinkers have been blinded by the white racial frame – Karl Marx, Max Weber, etc. Yet from what I have read of him so far, he does not account for how he himself is not blinded too, at least to some degree. It seems he gets past that by using Black, Asian, Latino and Native American counter-frames to see the white racial frame.
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Kiwi:
Do you believe that those views are entirely fallacious?
Kiwi:
Again, do you believe that those views are entirely fallacious?
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[…] yes, Abagond himself has produced yet another screed, this one based on the paranoid fantasies of Joe. R. Feagin, certified anti-American leftist […]
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To me, it seems you want Fareed Zakaria, Obama, Oprah, Henry Louis Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry and Al Sharpton — to be “road warriors” on camera because they have a pulpit and a stage (like Jeremiah White) and an audience — an audience that is made up of more than just black people, so the topics need to be “inclusive”.
Rev. Al is the only one who gets a pass to use a black “counter-framework” if he wants but even he tunes it down on his show– the question is why? (and we all know the answer) — They all can’t go work for Current TV so they can express “how they really feel”
I just don’t think people who Have to play the game, should be lumped with the likes of Clarence Thomas or David Webb.
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@ Matari, GREAT quotes. Thanks for sharing.
@ Jefe, lol, but…
Not just security, but comfort and well-being, as Matari illustrated in his Lillian Smith quote.
This is what perplexes me most about the white racial frame — the dichotomous thinking, as Abagond calls it. That they can’t see the absurdity of their behavior in accord with their conditioning. It’s like the commenters who venture on to this blog to refute Abagond’s posts, but only end up endorsing or illustrating his points, unbeknown to them. Can people really be that lacking in self-awareness, particularly people who claim to be intellectually superior and logical or rational?
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@King
“If the thought comes from a Black mind then who am I to say that the content of the idea is not Black?”
You are conflating ideas which is consequently leading you to draw false parallels. On one hand you are addressing the right to dissenting thought in terms of Black consciousness. That criticism is appropriate and reflects the topic of this blog post. Afterall, Dubois and Washington debated at length over that very same issue.
However, your argument is attenuated when you move to generalize Black thought as any thought expressed by an ethnically Black individual. This is why I made a marked distinction about what Black conciousness ponders, rather than who produces Black thoughts.
Black consciousness is a mode of thought that questions and engages in matters pertinent to the racial issues faced by the Black community. While Blacks are often the core of such thinkers, they are not exclusively the contributors of such thought. Tim Wise, John Brown, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner: White men with Black conciousness.
The inverse is also true. There are ethnically Black people who express White conciousness (superiority), be it Larry Elder, Tommy Sotomayor or any other such Uncle Tom/Cooning/Minstrel figure that is trotted out to affirm White racism.
So not evry thought a Black person has is a thought invested in Black conciousness nor is every Black person invested in Black thought to befin with. There are some very White-minded Black people.
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Randy,
You do know that stereotypes are simply beliefs and are not truths. So whether or not they are fallacious is certainly beside the point.
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In my area, unarmed security guards average $12 per hour. That is above minimum wage.
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Abagond, not sure if this is the right post for this, but
for those people who just love statistics:
NY’s “stop and frisk” over the years has resulted in:
88% of those stops resulting in No arrest or summons and it also showed that whites were found with more illegal contraband on their persons, than blacks and Hispanics but blacks and Hispanics were still searched more often.
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[…] white racial frame | Abagond Good for those who want the sociology behind race in the news. colour-blind racism: the four frames – Another frame-based sociological take, that of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. political arguments – also uses the idea of frames […]
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I have been listening to Chauncey DeVega ‘s podcast where distinguished professor and author has been a guest. I love hearing him explain white racism and whiteness in America. Next to Tim Wise, Dr. Feagin is another of my favorites when it comes to exposing the monsters of white supremacy.
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*Distinguished professor and author Joe R. Feagin has made me a fan of his work and activism speaking on white racism and white supremacy and white fragility. I have started putting his books in my Amazon cart.
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