ABSTRACT
The expansion of European countries from the 1400s to the early 1900s brought colonial exploitation to much of the globe. Much historical research demonstrates there has long been in North America and elsewhere a dominant, white-created racial frame that provides an overarching and generally destructive worldview, one that extends across divisions of class, gender, and age. The perpetuation of systemic racism has required an intergenerational reproducing not only of racist institutions but also of the white racial frame that buttresses them. Major social frames are typically created, codified, and maintained by those at the top of a society, although this construction and perpetuation takes place in routine interaction with the views and practices of ordinary citizens. In the first century of North American slavery the white-virtue framing and negative black framing were becoming more developed and comprehensive. At an early historical stage, the anti-black perspective of white Americans was imbedded in the legal and political institutions undergirding slavery.
