ABSTRACT
In developing the white racial frame, whites early focused it on black Americans, which is the main reason that they remain central to that frame, a centrality some call "black exceptionalism". From the beginning, the white racial frame has made the prototypical "superior" racial group to be white American and the prototypical "inferior" racial group to be black American. As anti-Indian genocide and African American enslavement became ever more important in North American development, European and European American elites aggressively crafted and honed a well-developed white racial frame designed to defend overseas colonialism and imperialism. In the first century of colonial development one can observe the important naming process that was associated with the growing white racial frame. Native Americans have suffered great oppression at the hands of whites for at least as long a period, but have not been as central to white racial framing and to large-scale labor exploitation within white society.
