ABSTRACT
Whites have oppressed African Americans and other Americans of color to keep them in their societal place of extreme inequality. Thus, over the course of U.S. history, these Americans have had to engage in individual and group struggles against oppression and its mythologizing white frame. From the revolutionary era to the present, most whites have accepted some version of the liberty and justice frame but usually one that is only rhetorical and hypocritical when it comes to seriously redressing systemic racial oppression. Since the slavery era African Americans have created a home culture incorporating a shared justice morality and important cultural features from their African backgrounds and have reworked aspects of European American culture all shaped together collectively as they deal with everyday oppression. By contrasting the actual realities of white oppression with the white rhetorical hyperbole about liberty and justice, African American analysts have raised questions about the diversionary character and extraordinary hypocrisy of the old rhetoric.
