Systemic Racism and the White Racial Frame

The historical perspective shows that “White-imposed racism” with racial oppression, manifested through slavery and legal segregation, was a critical ingredient of the structural foundation of the USA, along with genocide and dispossession of the Indigenous people through settler colonialism. Systemic racism is presented as the predominant theory that illuminates contemporary racial inequality in the USA. Feagin’s White racial frame crafts and sustains this racism through racial beliefs, racial cognitive elements, racial visual and auditory imagery and language usage, racial feelings, and a predisposition to discriminate. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva posits that Whites set up a social collectivity and nurture a racial interest to uphold the racial status quo through racialized social systems where people are placed in a racial hierarchy and where social, political, economic, and psychological rewards are distributed within the framework of color-blind racism. Both Feagin and Bonilla-Silva came out of the critical race research tradition. In addition, given the magnitude and the variations in the demographic overrepresentation of Blacks and Hispanics in COVID-19 deaths across US States and counties, we developed a research proposal to study the role of spatial differences (urban-rural classification) on COVID-19 deaths among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics in the 50 States and DC, using the CDC dataset. The State/County: Urban/Rural was based on the six urbanization levels of the 2013 NCHS Urban-Rural Classification.