ABSTRACT
Rationalizing the destruction of indigenous peoples and enslavement of Africans in North America apparently seemed essential to the European colonizers. In their writings, colonialism and imperialism are rationalized by proto-racial thinking that from the beginning inclined the Spanish, English, and other European colonizers to dehumanize the "others" that they killed and enslaved as physically and culturally inferior. As European colonizers spread out across the Atlantic world, in their minds and practices they usually positioned themselves socially and mentally higher than other peoples with whom they came into contact. The major defining fi dimensions of the European American racial frame were already in place by the early decades of the 1600s, albeit dimensions that became ever more systematized over the next century. In developing the white racial frame, whites early focused it on black Americans, which is the main reason that they remain so central to that frame today, a centrality some analysts call "black exceptionalism.".
