ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the dominant white racial frame and the way that it has developed and impacted this society and others across the globe. It considers other important frames that have also developed over the last few centuries, frames that provide alternative or countering perspectives to the dominant framing. Counterframes have provided important tool kits enabling individuals and groups to effectively counter recurring white hostility and discrimination. Humanistic religious insights and resources from the African American home-culture have been important to the development of strong counterframes of resistance, from slavery to the present. The ever-perceptive, formerly enslaved black leader Frederick Douglass a developed an extensive counter-frame, first during enslavement in Maryland, fi then as an anti-slavery abolitionist, and later during legal segregation after the Civil War. By the 1950s, the black civil rights movement's protests and development of a strong anti-racist counter-frame had created a serious legitimation crisis for the country's white elite.
