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Defining people through White racial frames

by Melanie Ford
Zenith City Weekly

was once denied the opportunity to apply for a promotion. My boss said not to bother because he believed my husband, being Hispanic, wanted me at home, barefoot and with the babies.

My husband was native to Spain, while the term "Hispanic" refers to someone of North, Central, or South American descent.

Once our daughter was on her own, she looked at an apartment she liked and filled out the application. Then the manager called to tell her it wasn’t available.

She confronted him because he had just shown her the vacant apartment. She asked if it was because, now seeing her name, he thought she was Hispanic. He told her people of "her kind" sometimes make good tenants, but he wouldn’t rent the apartment to her.

Both statements were racist and had harmful consequences.

Hispanics are currently the largest minority group in the U.S., 15.8 percent of the population. In 1848, the U.S. annexed 55 percent of Mexico. The inhabitants of the region were largely Spanish–speaking, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, suddenly forced to live in a country created for Whites.

Although the annexation treaty guaranteed protection of their language, property, and civil rights, Mexican landowners quickly became farm workers and laborers for new landlords. In the mid–1900s, the U.S. admitted Mexicans for cheap farm labor under the Mexican Farm Labor Supply Program, but "legal" immigration did not allow them to apply for citizenship, as White Europeans could.

When the program ended, Mexicans still came into the country seeking jobs, but now they were entering illegally. Mexicans in the annexed territories (much of what is now the US Southwest) and those who immigrated in the mid–20th century preserved their culture and language to a greater extent, never achieving "acceptable" status.

Today, about half our country’s immigrants come from Latin America, the majority from Mexico. States such as South Carolina have passed laws requiring police to ask for the visas of anyone they suspect is not a U.S. citizen.

A response to high Hispanic immigration, these laws encourage racial profiling and discrimination based on stereotyped characteristics, such as skin color or accent.

The current immigration reform debate centers around, first, whether the U.S. should reduce the number of people allowed to enter the country legally and, second, how the U.S. should treat those who enter the country with a valid visa and then overstay its expiration.

According to Joe Feagin in The White Racial Frame (Routledge, 2010), at the time of the Mexican territorial annexation, U.S. leaders considered Mexicans non–White.

Mexican men became stereotyped as lazy and hypersexual (but willing to work for very low wages) by what Feagin calls a "racist frame"—a worldview that highlights the virtue and superiority of Whites compared to the vices and inferiority of non–Whites, creating oppression.

Feagin concluded that racism still exists because this framing became systemic in our culture. European immigrants were first considered non–White. Within a generation or so, they assimilated into American culture, adopted the White racial frame, lost their native languages, and blended into the "superior" White class. Hispanics still identify with their language and country of origin.

The only way to undo these frames is to learn the history of Hispanics and to voice objection to racism. Learn why people immigrate and how they are treated when they arrive. Get to know people of all colors and work to undo the racism that keeps the U.S. a country for White people.

Melanie Ford is a lawyer in Duluth. She is on the Board of Directors of Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, Inc. and a community representative on the steering committee of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative.

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