ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in some detail why this dominant white racial frame is so imbedded in major institutions and so foundational in the United States. Feagin shows that the primary reason is that the U.S. is built on about 350 years of extreme racial oppression—slavery and Jim Crow segregation (more than 80 percent of the country’s history). Widespread European colonialism, genocide, and slavery are examined as the historical background of this foundational and systemic racism—including its racial hierarchy, white racial capital, and imposed racial identities—that developed in what became the United States. The chapter details how slavery becomes firmly institutionalized for nearly two and a half centuries, including in the U.S. Constitution and later legal documents and court cases. The concluding section summarizes the dimensions of systemic racism considered so far and develops briefly the concept of the social reproduction of systemic racism across many generations. Its perpetuation has required a constant reproducing of major inegalitarian institutions and their discriminatory processes. And white individuals and small groups have had to participate actively in the ongoing discriminatory reproduction of the major institutions that reproduce this racially inegalitarian system.
