Evaluation and the Framing of Race

February 1, 2017 draft.

Evaluation and the Framing of Race

Ernest R. House

Abstract. Racial framing can have strong effects on programs, policies, and even evaluations. Racial framing developed as a justification for the exploitation of minorities and has been a primary causal factor in the persistence of racism. By being aware of its pattern, structure, origins, and how racial framing generates effects, we can significantly reduce its influence, thus enhancing the rigor of our studies by controlling for a potential bias that’s often covert. Stories play a critical role in framing and reframing processes. They constitute a key part of the vocabulary of action.

 

Suppositions

On August 9, 2015, a white police officer shot and killed a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Michael Brown, the African American, was unarmed; the policeman shot him six times. This incident shocked the American public. For several nights, large crowds of protestors demonstrated in the streets of Ferguson, chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” The Missouri governor mobilized the National Guard in military gear to confront the protestors. Whites in surrounding neighborhoods were terrified by the demonstrations. Why did these events occur? What do they say about American society? What do they mean for professional evaluation?

            To understand some events, you have to consider the culture in which they occur. Ferguson is in my home territory, about 15 miles from Alton, Ill., where I was born. The area has a long history of racial violence. James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King’s assassin, was born there a decade before me. I’ve written a childhood memoir about what it was like growing up in this culture from the viewpoint of a child. Violence was a childhood companion (House, 2015).

Here are three suppositions.

Supposition 1: If a society sees itself as democratic, and in many ways is democratic, and yet is racist and does not recognize the extent or nature of that racism, the society will promulgate programs and policies that purport to help the affected minorities, but many programs and policies will damage these minorities significantly (House, 1999).

Supposition 2: Racism in America is not a simple vestige of the past. Rather American racism is created and recreated in the present. Several identifiable social entities, mechanisms, processes, and structures generate racist beliefs and behaviors.

Supposition 3: Evaluation plays an important role in these processes. Evaluation is not a cause of the racism, but for racist processes to have their effects, the evaluation function must be distorted, coopted, or corrupted.

            We have many suspect programs and policies, among them the operations of the Ferguson police and city officials and the War on Drugs. In Ferguson city officials have been trying to fund the city budget by fining its citizens, especially African Americans, who constitute 67% of the population and incur more than 90% of the fines. The 50 white and 4 black police officers are evaluated by how many citations they issue. When black citizens step out the door, they are targets. If they complain, they’re arrested and levied heavy fines. If they don’t pay, they’re put in jail. Violations of the 4^th and 14^th amendments are common (US Department of Justice, 2015). It was in this grating environment that Michael Brown was killed. When citizens protested in the streets, whites living nearby were terrified, thus regenerating racist beliefs among whites. Surely, small children absorb the fear and attitudes of their parents.

            One of the most egregious programs has been the War on Drugs, as analyzed by Michelle Alexander (Alexander, 2015).

--In 1982 Reagan declared the War on Drugs as part of his campaign against crime and welfare. Every president since then has augmented the program.

--At the beginning the US prison population was 300 thousand. It’s now more than 2 million.

--Before the program began, US incarceration rates were the same as those in Germany. US rates are now 8 times greater than Germany’s (and 6 to 10 times those of other developed countries).

--Most of the increase in the prison population has been from drug arrests. In 2005, 80% of drug arrests were for possession of marijuana.

--In some states 90% of those admitted to prison for drug offenses are black or Latino.

--In some cities 80% of young black males have prison records. As convicted felons, they cannot get jobs or vote when they are released. They’re stigmatized for life. Many end up back in prison. The effects on their families are devastating (Desmond, 2016).

--Studies show that people of all colors and social classes use and sell illicit drugs at similar rates. Yet in some places black men have been admitted to prison at 20 to 50 times the rate of white males.

--Let me put the issue another way. If the same arrest and sentencing protocols were applied to the majority population as to minorities, many readers of this article would be in prison, along with the last 3 presidents of the US and Rush Limbaugh.

--The US now has a larger percentage of blacks in prison than South Africa did during Apartheid.

            What can evaluators do?

1. When programs and policies affect minorities, evaluators should look for side effects and long-term outcomes not anticipated by the rhetoric of the program or policy. We should examine how programs and policies actually function rather than their rhetoric. We should look for possible negative outcomes. That entails some understanding of minority cultures in which these programs and policies are implemented (Hood, Hopson, Frierson, 2015, 2005, House, 1999).

2. Programs and policies based on what one sociologist calls the “white racial frame” are highly suspect. This framework incorporates stereotypic views that most whites have of minorities (Feagin, 2013). Many programs and policies are based on and reinforce this negative racial frame.

3. As evaluators we should discover and study the social entities, mechanisms, processes, and structures that generate racism. These findings could generalize to other settings. Being aware of these processes could help in conducting evaluations of other programs and policies.

4. We should check our own predispositions. No white person growing up in this country can be entirely free of racial framing. Where this framework prevails, racist activities are likely to be invisible and taken for granted.

5. We should also check the work of our colleagues for such dispositions and for help. We need help from peers on this issue, given the pernicious nature of racism. This is a professional responsibility, as well as an individual one.

            Where are we now? We have over 520 years of racism in America and still counting, actually since the inception of the society. This latest phase is not yet named, but it includes “push back” against the civil rights gains of prior decades. In his book Between the World and Me, the African American journalist T. Coates says minorities can and should protest against racism, but they cannot solve the problem (Coates, 2015). Only the majority can solve it. I agree with that.

Reducing Biases in Evaluation

What does evaluation have to do with racism? A critical task for evaluators in any evaluation is to identify potential biases that might impede their conduct of honest, accurate, and fair evaluations. Potential biases differ depending on the entities being evaluated, the particular approach to evaluation, and the context. In my first evaluation, the evaluation of the Illinois Gifted Program, my sponsors, the Illinois Department of Education, pressed me to make an early report to the legislature to assure them that the evaluation was worth the substantial money they were spending. The field of evaluation was new, and they wanted to show utility for such a study.

To collect data, we mailed a survey to hundreds of school districts. What we got back was mostly garbage. District administrators were reluctant to respond honestly to an inquiry from a group identified with state authority. The administrators were test-wise. For example, the responses from the Chicago high schools were all filled out exactly the same way in the same handwriting and sent back together, with the questionnaires tied together with a ribbon. It seems that all the Chicago high schools were doing everything possible for their gifted students. I can’t remember the color of the ribbon, but I got the message.

As evaluators we had to rethink what we were doing and discover ways to compensate for this strong response bias. One strategy was to send well-trained, face-to-face interview teams to a sample of school districts to search for program effects. It’s one thing to respond to a questionnaire from a distant source and quite another to answer questions from well-informed interviewers in your school. However, this was expensive. There were a thousand school districts, but most students were located in a few larger ones. Fortunately, experts had already sorted out the sampling bias issues. We drew a stratified random sample from which to make generalizations about program quality and reported our findings in several interim reports.

Sampling biases, response biases, and the biases discussed in evaluation texts are familiar. However, there are other biases that evaluators are less prepared to address. For example, evaluators can be caught in conflicts of interest, and the biases can be extremely damaging to findings. Privatization and deregulation have led to many conflicted evaluation situations. The problem is acute in the evaluation of pharmaceutical drugs, where drug companies have assumed control of the evaluations. Billions of dollars can depend on the findings. Such pressures sometimes distort the findings. I’ve discussed these biases elsewhere and suggested ways to deal with them (House, 2011).

Evaluators should also be prepared for potential racial biases. Hood, Hopson and Frierson (2015, 2005) have proposed a culturally responsive evaluation approach that emphasizes better understanding of minority cultures on the part of majority evaluators. Majority evaluators are often poorly informed (and misinformed) about minority cultures. Better information can help evaluators operate in cultural settings different from their own.

Another strategy is to examine the sources of bias in hopes we can learn to mitigate them.  In this paper I want to explore racial bias caused by the “white racial frame.” The white racial frame is the way many whites perceive minorities. Such racial framing can bias programs, policies, and evaluations. There is strong evidence to indicate that some programs and policies have racist effects. Evaluators may overlook these effects and even contribute to them inadvertently. By being aware of racial framing, evaluators should be better prepared to anticipate, discover, and deal with the biases, much as we deal with other threats to validity. The difference is that racial biases are more covert and pernicious.

Racism in America frequently seems ubiquitous and overwhelming. As we encounter racial violence in the streets and widespread discriminatory behavior, the situation sometimes seems hopeless. Perhaps if we can understand the underlying causes of racial bias, we can sort out the problems. I’m encouraged by the progress made in understanding human genetics. A few hundred years ago our knowledge of genetics was primitive, driven by superstitions, misconceptions, racism, sexism, and willful ignorance. Over many decades, scholars from many disciplines sorted out the causal processes underlying genetics, a complicated story of discovery told by Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Gene (2016).

Perhaps evaluators, expert at discerning biases in general, can make progress in understanding racial biases. In the next several sections I explore the content of the white racial frame, what it obscures, its origins, how it was formed and disseminated, and why framing is so powerful. If evaluators understand racial framing, they will be better equipped to protect against it. Seeing the structure clearly should help us imagine ways to change it.

The White Racial Frame

Racial framing is a key element in American racism. In The White Racial Frame, sociologist Joe R. Feagin (2013) describes the content of the racial frame succinctly: “A great many white and nonblack Americans believe or assert that African Americans are violent, criminal, unintelligent, lazy, and oversexed among numerous other stereotypes and images” (Feagin, 2013, p. 101]. The racial frame is “an overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions, as well as…inclinations to discriminate” (p. 3). “Today, as whites move through their lives, they frequently combine racial stereotypes, and biases (a beliefs aspect), racial metaphors and concepts (a deeper cognitive aspect), racialized images (the visual aspect), racialized emotions (feelings), interpretive racial narratives, and inclinations to discriminate within a broad racist framing”(Feagin, 2013, p. 90).

For several centuries the racial frame has shaped the way many whites view race and act towards affected minorities. It’s worth examining the nature of racial framing to understand what it is, what it does, and how it works. And, of course, how the racial frame shapes programs, policies, and evaluations. Although racial framing affects several stigmatized minorities, including Native Americans and Latinos, I concentrate here on African Americans.

First of all, kinship and friendship groups are central to learning, practicing, and enforcing the racial frame. Here’s an excerpt from my childhood memoir (a passage written about 1978). The setting is Alton, Illinois, a few miles upriver from St. Louis, a region with a long history of racial violence.

When I was born in 1937, my father was a cab driver, living in a boarding house catering to cab drivers, located at 318 Ridge Street.  I was born on the couch in my parent's room.  For the first few days I slept in a chair near my parents' bed.

On the fourth night of my life, my mother was awakened by a noise in the room.  She reached up to turn on the reading light at the head of the bed.  As the light came on, she found herself staring at a black man standing at the foot of the bed.  For a few seconds my mother and the man stared into each other's face.  She screamed.

The man bolted and ran into the hallway.  My father jumped from bed, clad in his underwear, and pursued the man through the hallways.  By this time many people were awake, and the corridors of the boarding house filled with people running and shouting in confusion.  A gang of taxi drivers, led by my father, chased the man through the second story of the building.  Finally, the cornered black man found an open door leading out onto the roof of the first story and, judging his chances, jumped blindly out into the pitch-black night, disappearing into the darkness.

The boarding house rumbled with excitement until dawn, the men recounting the thrill of the chase, the women shivering with terror at the audacity of the intruder. In his boldness the thief had mistakenly dipped his hands into cold cream on the landlady's dresser and had wiped the cream from his hands with the corner of the bedspread under which she slept.

For her part my mother was certain that the thief had come for me.  From then on she insisted that I sleep in the middle of the bed, safely tucked away between her and my father. Years later as she rode a bus in the same city, the same man boarded the bus.  She recognized him immediately but did not know whether he recognized her.  After a few stops he got off to disappear once again.

Ten years after that she saw his picture on the front page of the newspaper.  He was accused of raping and killing an eighty-year old woman who lived alone on East Broadway.  The deputies taking him to the county seat for trial stopped at Domino's Tavern for drinks on the way.  They goaded the man into attempting an escape, intending to shoot him as he ran. He refused. They beat him unconscious but did not kill him (House, 2015, pp. 11-12).

This is a story I grew up with, that I heard told many times. Being only a few days old, I could not possibly have grasped these events at the time. Nonetheless, I have visual images of these scenes, of cab drivers running down hallways, of the fleeing man leaping out into the darkness from the second floor, and even of deputies at Domino’s Tavern goading the man into running. Domino’s was the center of crime in the county, and it’s plausible that the deputies would plan on killing him there.

How true is this story? Did my mother perceive and remember correctly? I don’t know. A family story like this is not likely to be doubted within the context in which it’s told. The story contains key elements of the white racial frame including the black man as menacing, dangerous, violent, criminal, oversexed, and devious in one brief family story. On the other hand, the man does not seem unintelligent or lazy, counter to the racial frame. If anything, he seems clever and enterprising.

During the burglary he focused on searching the landlady’s room, where cash and jewelry were most likely to be found, and he was ready to take an extreme beating when he realized the intent of his captors. An addition to the story is that the landlady had hired an African American lady to do her ironing once a week, and this woman had a younger brother or son living with her. Speculation was that this might be the same man. Stories like these are passed down and learned through kinship and friendship groups. They convey value-laden frames.

Frames work to shape perception, and the racial frame shapes white perceptions and values about race. The frame acts as a screen to block facts and events inconsistent with the frame. It accounts for why some whites believe what is not true about minorities and do not believe other things that are true. The racial frame is reinforced by misinformation, mass media, pseudo-science, and willful ignorance. Parts of the frame are drawn on selectively in daily life, with individuals accepting or rejecting various aspects. Framing is based on repetition, performance, collective memory, and collective forgetting.

Often, performances of frame values are enacted “backstage,” among whites socializing out of public view. Feagin and colleagues analyzed the diaries of college students to reveal the many manifestations that racial denigration takes. Racial denigration is often presented as humor and entertainment in the form of racial jokes. Indeed, minstrel shows presenting black stereotypes have a long history. Frame elements are carried forward in public media.

In addition to negative images of African Americans, the white racial frame also integrates stories of white supremacy (Feagin, 2013). In mass media presentations there is often a noble white savior who arrives to help desperate minorities, as in films like Glory, Avatar, or The Blind Side. The whites are noble, brave, kind, natural born leaders who defend hapless blacks against evil whites. One of the most renowned portrayals is that of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. In that novel Atticus defends a helpless black man against charges of raping a white woman in defiance of virulent negative public opinion in a small southern town.

In author Harper Lee’s earlier version of the novel, Go Set a Watchmen, her father, the model for Atticus, was a racist member of the White Citizens Council, which he was in real life. After Scout berates her father for belonging to a white citizens group in Go Set A Watchman, Atticus tells his daughter this (written in the 1950s):

“Now think about this. What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you. There’d be another Reconstruction.

Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t know how to run ‘em?....We’re outnumbered, you know….”

“Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you’ve seen it all your life. They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they’re far from it yet” (Lee, 2015, p. 246-247).

 In the revised novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the racist real person was transformed into a mythical hero in what is now considered a great inspirational novel about race, one featuring a noble white hero. The myth making of the novel grew out of the dominant racial frame and reinforces the frame.

Feagin suggests that myth making typifies the racial frame on a grand scale. Several big picture narratives connect frame elements into stories with morals that are important to white Americans. “These emotion-laden scenarios include stories about white conquest, superiority, hard work, and achievement. They make powerful use of stereotypes, images, and other elements from the overarching frame. They include rag-to-riches narratives…. According to these mythological narratives, most English settlers came with little, but by drawing on religious faith and hard work, they ‘settled’ and made a nearly ‘vacant’ land prosper, against the hostilities of ‘savage’ Indians” (Feagin, 2013, p. 13).

Here’s another excerpt from my memoir illustrating seven-year old boys practicing racial framing in 1944.

Mostly though I experienced the war through the radio and the movies. The movies were filled with war stories. Movie heroes like John Wayne, who reminded me of Uncle Popeye, fought battles in most movies. The exceptions were the cowboy movies, in which the heroes fought Indians and outlaws. Only the weapons were different. In our play we reenacted the battles. With friends I played either “war,” fighting the Japanese and Germans, or “cavalry,” fighting the Indians. In both cases we imagined ourselves leaders of numbers of men, faced with heavy odds, but finally conquering the enemy. The battles reported in the newspapers were a dim backdrop for the pictures in our heads (House, 2015, pp. 30-31).

Of course, humans have many frames that help them interpret the world, and the frames are not always consistent. Feagin identifies a liberty and justice frame held by some whites who acknowledge the injustices of racism, an anti-oppression frame held by some African Americans resisting racism, and a “home culture” frame shared by African Americans that has little to do with whites.

These frames are enduring social constructions shared by large numbers of people that shape behavior and society. This conception of racism is different from the common belief that racism is caused by ignorant bigots who haven’t learned any better. In the frame conception, social mechanisms and structures generate racism and reproduce it. Racism is built into American society, one reason it’s so difficult to eradicate. It’s not a simple add-on.

Why should evaluators care? The racial frame is instrumental in shaping many programs and policies that we evaluate. Racial framing permeates the society. Evaluators should be ready to identify racial framing when it occurs.

What the Racial Frame Obscures

            The white racial frame grew out of the imperial expansion of Europeans beginning in the 15^th century. A key event was Columbus landing in the Americas in 1492. Europeans expanded their imperial efforts globally, relying on military superiority to subdue local peoples. They expropriated the land of the original people and sometimes imported slaves from Africa to work the lands, growing commodities like sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Before their mass production, cotton goods were highly valued luxury items.

In Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert (2014) details how the cotton trade transformed the world economy. Growing and harvesting cotton was extremely labor intensive. Between 1500 and 1800 the Europeans, first the Spanish, followed by the Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, and Danes transported 8 million slaves from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations. They paid slave catchers in Africa with manufactured cotton goods. Because of the extreme violence embedded in the expropriation of land, the procurement of slaves, and forcible slave labor, Beckert (2014) labels this period of economic development “war capitalism.” War capitalism captures the violent nature of the enterprise.

Chartered mercantile companies, like the East India Company, carried out imperial activities with national assistance. European imperial countries were organized into an ‘inside” and an “outside.” Inside the imperial countries the normal laws, rules, and practices applied. However, in seized territories controlled by private companies, the companies could do anything they wanted. And they did. Violence was common; practices were brutal. Privatized violence was a core competency of the companies (Beckert, 2014).

In 1791 several hundred thousand slaves in Saint-Domingue, the largest cotton-growing island in the West Indies, revolted, defeating French colonial forces in the biggest slave revolt in history. The victors abolished slavery and established the state of Haiti. Europeans were horrified and looked for safer sources of cotton. In the US European Americans were already engaged in war capitalism practices. They were driving off or exterminating Native Americans, appropriating their lands, and ceding these lands to plantation owners, who imported Africans as slave labor.

In 1784 entrepreneurs like Samuel Greg in Manchester, England, began mechanizing the manufacture of cotton goods, motivated by British wages being six times those in India. Greg, heavily involved in the cotton and slave trades, improved cotton-processing machinery. To man his factories, he recruited 10 to 12 year old boys from poorhouses and unemployed women. Through mechanization, British cotton manufacturing became more efficient, greatly increasing the appetite for raw cotton. As cotton demand rose, more Africans were enslaved and shipped to America. Half the slaves were sent after 1780.

By 1860, American plantations were supplying 77% of British raw cotton imports and 90% of those to France, with similar amounts to other countries. Cotton was 61% of US exports. In the UK 3.5 million people were employed manufacturing cotton goods. When the Civil War began in 1861 and cut off the cotton supply, half a million people, 25% of the workers in Lancashire, became unemployed. There were riots in the streets. Although the British slave trade had stopped in 1834, William Gladstone, the British prime minister, and most European leaders were pro-Confederacy in the belief that slavery was necessary for the cotton industry to prosper.

They believed that cotton tending was so odious, only slaves could be forced to do it, and someone had to do it for the good of the world economy. Gladstone considered interceding in the American Civil War on behalf of the Confederate states, but after thinking it over, he decided that wasn’t a good idea. By that time the US had the largest army in the world, and Britain had no way of defending its Canadian territories.

In practice, American slavery was brutal. “Cotton demanded quite literally a hunt for labor and a perpetual struggle for its control. Slave traders, slave pens, slave auctions, and the attendant physical and psychological violence of holding millions in bondage were of central importance to the expansion of cotton production in the United States and of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain” (Becket, L 2202). “To lower their costs, masters provided the enslaved with minimal food, crude shelter, and ragged clothes. Most slaves had to work at least twelve hours a day and six days a week under close supervision and the cutting whip of a white overseer…. To punish resisting slaves and terrify the rest, planters relied on torture, mutilation and executions” (Taylor, 2016, L 371-3722).

First hand accounts, like Sydney Northrup’s (1854) Twelve Years a Slave document the brutality, as do recent social histories (Taylor, 2016, Baptist, 2014).

 It was rarely a day passed by without one or more whippings. This occurred at the time the cotton was weighed. The delinquent, whose weight had fallen short, was taken out, stripped, made to lie on the ground, face downwards, when he received a punishment proportioned to his offence. It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of the slaves can be heard from dark till bed time, on Epps plantation, any day during the entire period of the cotton-picking season.

The number of lashes is graduated according to the nature of the case. Twenty five are deemed a mere brush, inflicted for instance, when a dry leaf or piece of boll is found in the cotton; fifty is the ordinary penalty following all delinquencies of the next higher grade; one hundred is called severe: it is the punishment inflicted for the serious offence of standing idle in the field; from one hundred and fifty to two hundred is bestowed upon him who quarrels with his cabin-mates, five hundred, well laid on, besides the mangling of the dogs, perhaps, is certain to consign the poor, unpitied runaway to weeks of pain and agony (Northrup, 1853, p. 75).

Slave owners were always afraid for their own safety. They had enslaved millions of Africans and treated them brutally, and they were terrified the slaves would revolt and retaliate. In fact, there were more than 350 slave revolts. In some regions of the south, slaves heavily outnumbered whites. To prevent rebellions and capture run-aways, slaveholders enlisted the help of working class whites, offering them political and economic privileges. Gun ownership among whites was universal.

Money Rules

Why did European Americans engage in the brutal practices entailed by slavery? The answer is clear: Money. Cotton and sugar plantations were immensely profitable. Planters had a huge supply of cheap land taken from Native Americans, slave labor captured in Africa, and investment capital from Europe and the northern states. Slaves themselves were used as collateral for loans. In 1807, one plantation had annual profits of 22.5%, a huge profit margin for a farming enterprise.

In 1619 Jamestown colonists purchased the first 20 African slaves from a Dutch ship. The number of slaves grew from 400,000 in the 1770s to 1 million in 1800, in a total US population of 5 million. By 1860, just before the Civil War, the slave population had grown to 4 million in a total population of 30 million. The white population increase had been mostly in the north and west regions of the country. The southern cotton growing states had 4 million slaves in a population of 10 million.

The market price of a healthy field hand was 10 to 12 years of a free worker’s wages. In 1860 the price of a male slave of prime working age was $2000, with the annual wage of a free farm laborer being $200. The average rate of return on slave labor was 7 or 8 percent, according to Thomas Piketty, the French economist (Piketty, 2014, p. 163). In assessing the economic value of slaves, Piketty estimates that the value of the slaves themselves was equal to the value of the land. He calculates national capital value in terms of years of national income. (For example, the current national income of the US is roughly $18 trillion dollars. That would be 1 year of national income for the current US.) The total value of the slaves was about 1.5 years of US national income at that time. However, in the southern states where slaves were heavily concentrated, the capital value of the slaves was worth 2.5 to 3 years of the income of the southern states.

By combining the value of the slaves with the value of the land, Piketty estimates the total value of capital in the southern states was 6 years of the southern states income. How much wealth was this compared to other places? This amount was slightly less than the total value of capital in the UK and France combined, the leading economic countries. This was a great deal of wealth indeed. Furthermore, this wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few large plantation owners. In 1860, 85% of the cotton was grown on lots over 100 acres using 91.2% of the slaves (Beckert, 2014). The owners of the large plantations were the billionaires of their day.

Like the billionaires of today, plantation owners used their wealth to control the politics of their states and country. “Southern slaveholders had enshrined the basis of power into the Constitution with its three-fifths clause. A whole series of slaveholding presidents, Supreme Court judges, and strong representation in both houses of Congress guaranteed seemingly never-ending political support for the institution of slavery. Such power on the national level was enabled and supplemented by the absence of competing elites in the slaveholding states themselves, and the enormous power slaveholders had over state governments” (Beckert, 2014, L 2226).

Just how deeply committed slave owners were to holding on to their slaves is demonstrated by the ghastly damage of the Civil War. More than 600,000 people died, more than all America’s other wars combined, in a population of 30 million. Slave owners induced working class whites to support the Confederate cause, though most southern whites had little wealth to fight for.

Piketty summarizes the inequality this way: “In the South we find a world where inequalities of ownership took the most extreme and violent form possible, since one half of the population owned the other half: here, slave capital largely supplanted and surpassed landed capital” (Piketty, 2014, p. 161). As for long term effects, “The complex and contradictory relation to inequality largely persists in the United States to this day: on the one hand this is a country of egalitarian promise, a land of opportunity for millions of immigrants of modest background; on the other it is a land of extremely brutal inequality, especially in relation to race, whose effects are still quite visible” (Piketty, 2014, p. 161).

When the Civil War ended, slavery ended, but racial exploitation did not. Former slaves expected the plantations to be divided into small lots and ceded to them since they had worked the lands all their lives. Many had fought for the north in the war. Their goal was subsistence farming. They wanted to be independent yeoman in charge of their own destiny. To their dismay, the federal government under President Johnson gave the plantations back to the former slaveholders. The governing elites decided the only way to grow cotton was to bind the former slaves to working the cotton fields again. After political struggles that restricted the new black freemen’s political rights, most former slaves ended as sharecroppers. This was the Jim Crow period of subordination and segregation.

            By 1900 75% of black farmers were sharecroppers, working small parcels of leased land. They remained in deep poverty because they were charged exorbitant interest rates for debts they incurred for food and clothing. Unpaid debt and being unemployed were crimes subject to fines and imprisonment. This bound them to the land. Furthermore, their political and civil rights were severely repressed by intimidation and violence. They could not vote their way out of the system even though they constituted a large proportion of the southern population. The Ku Klux Klan was a major agent of repression and remains the largest terrorist organization in the US. Other cheap labor included convicts leased to landowners. Most were African Americans. Death rates on the chain gangs were astronomical. By 1891 the US was producing two times more cotton than before the war and supplying 81% of the cotton in the UK, 66% in France, and 61% in Germany. The Jim Crow era did not end until the civil rights movement.

In short, America has been racist since its inception, much of its early wealth built on stolen lands and slave labor. Similar exploitation occurred in other parts of the world during the European imperial age. Physical coercion was widespread in cotton-growing areas, including Brazil, Peru, Egypt, and India. “Capitalism’s awe-inspiring advances continued to rest not just on a great variety of labor regimes, but on a staggering degree of violence” (Beckart, 2014 L 6329). In the 1870s and 1890s millions died in famines when cotton prices fell. In India alone, between 6 and 10 million people died. There was enough food but poor agricultural workers didn’t have money to buy it. The cotton industry was the beginning of global industrialization. For some, it came at a very high price.

Origins of the White Racial Frame

            After conquering large parts of the world, colonizing them, and establishing brutal systems like slavery, how could Europeans and European Americans live with themselves? After all, they saw themselves as civilized, humane Christians. How could they justify horrendous exploitation and even genocide in which millions died? They did indeed try to justify these acts to themselves and to others. Their main strategy was to denigrate the people they exploited and abused. In short, they dehumanized their victims, as often happens (Cohen, 2001). Their efforts produced the white racial frame as a way of justifying the exploitation.

            At first the Europeans drew on religion for justification. Medieval scholars had produced the “great chain of being” that ranked everyone from top to bottom the way God ordered them in nature (Lovejoy, 1934, 1963). In this great hierarchy Christians were above non-Christians, aristocrats above ordinary people, and men above women. When Europeans encountered Africans, Asians, and Native Americans, the colonizers already had a top down, patriarchal social system in mind. They placed Africans and Native Americans at the bottom of this social/moral, God-given order.

            In this scheme European males were superior, powerful, and manly, while the subordinated and exploited were inferior, weak, and childlike (Feagin, p. 40). European males were superior in their rationality, control of emotions, and right to govern. They knew what was best for primitive peoples. Indeed, some people were so far down the hierarchy they were like animals. Initially, Europeans saw Native Americans as “savages” and “wild beasts.” Upon encountering them, Columbus and his men felt free to mistreat, kill, and enslave them (Feagin, p. 43). (Some Spaniards were so concerned about this harsh treatment of fellow humans that the moral issue was turned over to the great scholars at the University of Valladolid to consider. After much deliberation, the scholars decided that when soldiers encountered Native Americans, they were to shout, “Do you accept Christ as your savior?” If the Native Americans ran away, the Spanish were free to enslave or kill them. They were infidels. Of course, the challenge was presented in Spanish.)

            As late as Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), the English portrayed Africans ambiguously. Othello the Moor was a formidable character. But as slave numbers increased so did their denigration. Slaveholders, judges, doctors, ministers, merchants, officials, and other local leaders carried out negative racial framing through the schools, churches, and legal system in the northern and southern states. Leading preachers in the north like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards proclaimed the inferiority of Africans from their pulpits.

European and American scientists played an important role in transforming the “great chain of being” hierarchy, with God at the top, into a secular hierarchy that established “races” and “species” as part of the natural order. Sir William Petty, a leading anatomist and philosopher, accentuated physical differences as being critical. By 1700 an elaborate anti-black racial frame was in place. African Americans were seen as having distinct physical features, being bestial and apelike, unintelligent, uncivilized, alien, immoral, criminal, dangerous, lazy, rebellious, and having disorganized families. The white racial frame classified humans into discrete racial groups, ranked them hierarchically, and linked their physical features to inner and cultural qualities that were inheritable.

European Americans were portrayed as superior in rationality, in control of their emotions, unlike Africans, and naturally equipped to govern with their superior traits. From this view, it was better for Africans and others that they submit to subordination. Scholars played an important role in developing and legitimating these ideas. In the 1730s Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus advanced the notion that Europeans were inventive, ingenious, orderly, and governed by laws, whereas Africans were lazy, devious, and unable to govern themselves (Feagin, p. 65). The great Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, who exercised huge influence on the Americans, contributed racist ideas, as did Immanuel Kant and other European thinkers.

The American legal system was central to implementing the racial frame. Of the 55 white men who adopted the American Constitution in 1787, 40% were or had been slaveholders. George Washington had 500 slaves, Thomas Jefferson had 600, and James Madison, who authored the Constitution, had 700. These were wealthy and influential men who built their political careers on their wealth and sought to protect their human property. Seven sections of the US Constitution protected slavery. One section stipulated that the new federal government should help put down uprisings, the fear being slave rebellions. The Senate, Supreme Court, and electoral college were designed as undemocratic institutions to protect the institution of slavery. Slaveholders did not want majorities of citizens to have power over their human property. Contrary to popular beliefs, the new American government was immersed in inequalities from its inception.

How could these men, who proclaimed, “All men are create equal” and promulgated the Bill of Rights, rule over such a morally bankrupt system of human exploitation? In Twelve Years A Slave, Sydney Northrup provided insight with reflections on the plantation owner’s young son.

Young Master Epps possessed some noble qualities, yet no process of reasoning could lead him to comprehend that, in the eye of the Almighty there is no distinction of color. He looked upon the black man simply as an animal, differing in no respect from any other animal, save in the gift of speech, and, therefore…. to work like his father’s mules—to be whipped and kicked and scourged through life…was the natural and proper destiny of the slave.

…it cannot well be otherwise than that, on arriving at maturity, the suffering of the slave will be looked upon with total indifference. The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who among their equals are regarded humane and generous (Northup, 1853, p.112).

Forming the Frame         

The nature of the slave/master, black/white relationship is difficult to untangle by those shaped by it, just as it’s difficult for males to understand how they construct their identities by defining females in certain ways. Insight into the formation of the racial frame and its place in the developing national identity is provided by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's examination of American literature, “an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served” (Morrison, 1992, p. 6). Morrison notes that it’s often the literary image that’s presented obliquely that reveals distorted and repressed thoughts about race.

“The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters” (pp. 11-12)…. America understood itself to be moving toward freedom and human dignity unprecedented in the world”(p. 33).

In her analysis, the early colonists found themselves in a vast continent far from civilization, besieged by threatening nature and savage forces. Escape from the class-ridden societies of Europe was one goal, freedom another. Slaves served as surrogate selves for colonists’ literary meditations on freedom, the terror of being European outcasts, dread of failure, fears of powerlessness, of loneliness, and internal aggression. "What arose out of collective needs to allay fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire….(Morrison, 1992, p. 38).
          One focus of American literature was the deliberate construction of the new American (Morrison, 1992, p. 15). This image was created by finding differences with Europeans, as well as with with slaves, Native Americans, and Latinos. Morrison illustrates the developing national identity in the character of an early planter slave-owner portrayed in Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West (Bailyn, 1986). William Dunbar was a young Scottish aristocrat educated by tutors and in math, astronomy, and belle-lettres. He became a London intellectual, an exemplar of Enlightenment thinking in scientific, literary, and philosophic studies. After moving to the New World, he suppressed a slave conspiracy on his Mississippi plantation in 1776. He was astounded at his slaves' ingratitude after he had treated them so well, and he administered two runaways 500 lashes on five separate occasions.

Bailyn assessed Dunbar's transformation: "Endlessly enterprising and resourceful, his finer sensibilities dulled by the abrasions of frontier life, and feeling within himself a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half- savage world" (Bailyn quoted in Morrison, p. 42-43). Dunbar was “strangely insensitive” to the suffering of his slaves. Morrison sees these traits as prototypical of the new white American male, traits valorized as themes in the national literature.
         Autonomy, authority, newness, difference, and absolute power became major literary themes. The sense of autonomy was transformed into themes of American "individualism." Newness was transformed into "innocence." Distinctiveness was transformed into "difference." Authority and absolute power were transformed into a conquering romantic heroism and masculine virility—and into moral problems of exercising power over others.

In her view, racial themes are embodied throughout American literature, often in disguised ways. The consequence has been a master narrative that spoke for Africans but not of them. One variant has been the view of the Africanist character as enabler, somehow pulling free of claims of retribution, as in Huckleberry Finn (Twain, 1884). Another is how African American characters are used to limn out and enforce whiteness and define the goals and qualities of whites, such as in To Have and Have Not (Hemingway, 1937).

 “There is still much ill-gotten gain to reap from rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of inferiority and the ranking of differences. There is still much national solace in continuing dreams of democratic egalitarianism available by hiding class conflict, rage, and impotence in figurations of race” (Morrison, 1992, p. 63). The presence of black people, along with gender and family, are inherent in the earliest lessons children are taught about their distinctness.

Disseminating the Frame

How was this framework passed on to others, particularly the vast numbers of new immigrants? Mathew Jacobson (1998) has traced how the concepts of "race" and "whiteness" were socially constructed and employed in the early US. In his history of the concept of "whiteness," he documents how immigrants were assimilated through redefinitions of what "whiteness" meant. What were seen as separate "races" of people gradually came to be socially constructed as "white ethnics." Racism was built into the American character and embedded in the American identity.
          Early colonial Americans defined themselves as "white" and "free" in contrast to those who were not. As settlers escaped the class systems of Europe, they redefined themselves along racial lines. The first colonists were mostly English, and they held strong beliefs about Anglo-Saxon superiority, beliefs the English displayed throughout their colonies. The original notion of different "races" with different characters derived from nature presumed many "races," including Celts, Teutons, Poles, Swedes, Hebrews, and Turks. Race was assumed to be hereditary, fixed, and closely associated with character. Knowing people’s race was a shorthand way of knowing their character.
          Race was also connected to one particularly important attribute: The Anglo-Saxons saw themselves as uniquely equipped to govern by reason of their natural superiority. The notion that the ability to govern endowed its possessors with rights over others had its origins in the British upper classes. This idea was generalized to foreign populations that the English contrasted to themselves, especially those they colonized. Racism was "a theory of who is who, of who belongs and who does not, of who deserves what and who is capable of what" (Jacobson, 1998, p. 6).
          Belief in their natural ability to govern became a justification for appropriating land and resources that others couldn’t manage properly. For the British these “others” included colonial peoples all over the world. For European Americans the “others” included African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Filipinos, who possessed property European Americans wanted.
          In the beginning, being white meant being Anglo-Saxon. All others were of different races. The founders of the nation wrote restrictions on these others into laws, including their rights to hold property, become citizens, enter the country, and be owned by whites. In the courts race was closely associated with property rights. The idea of "providing for the common defense" in a country of slaves and frontier settlements was racially motivated. The common defense required a heavily armed population.
          The 1790 naturalization law was highly exclusionary, and early statutes suggested that "whiteness" was the criterion for full citizenship. However, this idea was challenged by the arrival of assorted immigrants. The need for cheap labor for settlement and economic development opened immigration to different "races." Large numbers of immigrants arrived, including the Germans and Irish. Initially, they were seen as different races (Teutons and Celts) with their distinctive physical features signifying different character traits. The Irish were seen as a physically dark race that was not up to self-governance, as in colonized Ireland. Their assimilation was considered problematic.

Over decades each new immigrant group struggled to be defined in the "white" mainstream and what that portended for social and economic advantage. Eventually, most immigrant groups were redefined as "white ethnics" who were different in "culture" but not necessarily race. In other words, their ethnicity was derived from their culture and might be remedial, as opposed to their "race," which was not. Just as earlier “scientific” research had buttressed theories of race, new research supported theories of "ethnicity" when the time came. The assimilation of "ethnics," portrayed as American success stories, deepened the chasm between those considered "white" and those not. If Jews, Syrians, and Turks were "white," where did this leave the African Americans?
         The reason these immigrants were considered white was that they were contrasted to African Americans, who were never considered white. The immigrants gained “whiteness” by African Americans being excluded. It was highly advantageous for new immigrants to adopt beliefs that were overtly racist to contrast themselves to African Americans. Hence, the racist stigma manifested in the racial frame enabled the ethnics to become "Americanized" by excluding others. Immigrants were reduced to the white-black dichotomy, complicated by large influxes of Latinos. In short, immigrants and their descendants adopted the white racial frame.
         According to Jacobsen, the white/African American relationship is at the center of the national identity. Public policy swirls around this dichotomy much of the time, even when its influence is not recognized explicitly. Typically, African Americans are portrayed as an unfortunate group that happens to be marginal, a minority that never quite made it because of their negative character traits. African Americans have been central to the formation of national identity in that they provided a touchstone against which the "whites" defined themselves, though others, such as Native Americans and Latinos, have played similar roles. "Racism now appears not anomalous to the working of American democracy but fundamental to it" (Jacobson, 1998, p. 12).

The Power of Framing

The white racial frame has produced negative effects that have shaped American society. How is racial framing so influential? Feagin cites research showing how linguistic processes shape the way people interpret events.  I want to extend the analysis by drawing on research showing how the mind works in general (Kahneman, 2013, Stanovich, 2011). I’ve explored connections between cognitive research and evaluation elsewhere (House, 2016, 2015)

The basic principle of framing is the passive acceptance of the formulation given. The frame presented is taken as the focus of thought, and thinking derives from it rather than from alternatives. The frame that dominates is the most familiar or easily constructed model that represents one state of affairs and minimizes mental effort. According to researchers, humans are “cognitive misers” when it comes to thinking, and reframing requires more effort than passive acceptance (Stanovich, 2011, p. 67).

Mental frames can also carry considerable built-in emotion. For example, even medical professionals prefer medical treatments that offer a 90% survival rate to those offering a 10% mortality rate, though the substance is the same. Such is the power of framing.  Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman notes, “Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to the reality itself. The message about the nature of framing is stark…. Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance. Not all frames are equal, and some frames are clearly better than alternative ways to describe (or think about) the same thing” (Kahneman, 2011, 370-371).

Kahneman (2011) has presented a model of how the human mind works. People make systematic errors in their thinking, and some errors are attributable to the design of their cognitive machinery. There are two basic thinking processes. System 1 is intuitive and operates automatically with little apparent effort. If you see a photo of an angry woman, you’ll recognize intuitively that she’s angry. On the other hand, if you multiply 27 times 46, you won’t know the answer, but you can solve the problem. The second process is System 2 slow thinking.

System 1, fast thinking, includes detecting some objects are more distant than others, driving a car on an empty road, and understanding simple sentences in your native language. These abilities are learned through experience, association, and practice. Knowledge is stored in the associative memory and easily accessed. System 1 processing is mostly automatic, autonomous, and subconscious. I believe that System 1 is where the white racial frame works its effects, mostly without people being aware. Racial framing is intuitive and, in that sense, seems “correct” to them.

System 2, slow thinking, focuses attention on problems that demand concentration, such as filling out forms and checking the validity of arguments. “Pay attention” is the motto. These tasks require concentration and are disrupted without it. The number of System 2 tasks you can perform simultaneously is limited. You can concentrate on only a few things at a time.

Most mental processing occurs in System 1 while System 2 is in low-effort mode. System 1 offers impressions, intuitions, and intentions to System 2. If everything seems normal, System 2 accepts these as valid. When something seems abnormal, System 2 might deal with it. If so, it searches memory for an explanatory story. However, System 2 is lazy. Only when System 1 requires help does System 2 act. Even then, it exerts minimum effort. Consequently, System 1 chooses most thoughts and actions, not System 2 (Kahneman, 2011, p. 31).

“System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions. It offers interpretations of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future. It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising. It is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does this without your conscious awareness of your activities. System 1 is also…the origin of many systematic errors in your intuitions” (Kahneman, 2013, p.58).

This division of labor usually works because System 1 is very good at what it does. Its assessments of familiar situations are swift, accurate, and appropriate because they are based on repetition and long experience. It operates with heuristics enabling it to arrive at swift assessments, some shortcuts being mental frames, though short cuts can result in errors. Biases might be built into the interpretative frames themselves, which is the case with racial framing.

This allocation of attention was honed by evolution. Responding quickly to threats enhances survival, even if acting inappropriately occasionally. Spotting a lion that’s not there is a small price to pay for a quick response if one is there. However, System 1 can detect only simple relationships, such as “These are all alike.” It integrates knowledge about one thing but can’t deal with multiple topics. Only System 2 can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes, and make deliberate choices.

When jumping to conclusions, System 1’s criterion of success is the coherence of the story it pieces together. Ideas come from the associative memory and what the mind has been primed with. System 1 considers that which is familiar to be trustworthy, and impressions of familiarity are based on repetition. A sense of trustworthiness is often derived from sheer routine. System 1 relies on cognitive ease and lack of stress as markers of truth.

Consider the phrase “Bananas vomit.” Within seconds of apprehension, the mind and body react to make sense of it. You experience images, memories, and physical reactions. You didn’t start the reaction and you can’t stop it. The phrase activates a chain of associations. The essential feature of such mental events is their coherence. Each element is connected to other cognitive, emotional, and physical responses. In a few seconds you can make sense of a surprise event, create a causal story, and evaluate threats.

When jumping to conclusions, System 1 is not sensitive to the quality or quantity of data. Consistency is what counts, not completeness of the information. Coherence leads to confidence, and sometimes to over-confidence. The potential for mistakes is apparent. When presented with a strong stimulus, System 1 calls up an array of associated responses automatically.  It constructs stories about what’s happening. Most of the time, it jumps to correct conclusions because it recognizes familiar patterns. It gets into trouble when the situation is unfamiliar and pattern recognition is mistaken, or if the shortcuts it employs are flawed. Shortcuts include heavy emphasis on the familiar, judging based on few data points, assessing based on cues, relying on halo effects, and categorizing by exemplars, prototypes, and mental frames.

Overall, System 1 is gullible and inclined towards belief. It does not see alternatives. Doubting requires the ability to hold two incompatible interpretations in mind simultaneously. Doubt and uncertainty are not in System 1’s domain. System 2 does have doubting ability and is in charge of disbelief. It can check impressions submitted to it and catch errors. However, System 2 may be too busy or lazy and endorse impressions when it shouldn’t. The inference process is vulnerable to confirmation bias based on seeking only compatible data.

What happens if System 1 has been heavily primed and programmed with the white racial frame? It interprets racial events as natural and normal. Coherence is that which fits the racial frame. Associations include ideas, images, emotions, and threat levels connected to the racial frame. If both System 1 and System 2 are primed, familiar, and reinforced by society, racial judgments slip past System 2 monitoring. System 2 might also be biased and unable to detect racial biases. Racial framing produces racial interpretations automatically.

When a white policeman is caught in a surprising and threatening racial situation, he or she may have a tendency to resort to judgments and actions derived intuitively and automatically from the white racial frame. That action may well be inappropriate and even violent if not restrained. It takes considerable control to overcome racial framing’s automatic responses. In trying to manage such situations, it would be prudent to recognize in advance when they might occur and anticipate likely mistakes. We can try to avoid these situations and train intensively to react properly.

Of course, this analysis does not justify racial framing. Rather this analysis offers a partial explanation of how racist acts occur and why racism is so invidious and pernicious. To mitigate racism, we should try to understand how it occurs. We also need to identify and analyze the societal forces that nurture racial framing. Unfortunately, there are forces in society that promote and reinforce it. Pseudo-science is one of those forces.

Reframing

            If frames can be powerfully influential, how can we change them? Change can occur through reframing, that is, by reframing the way we interpret events. The racial frame is so embedded in our mentality, collective memories, and social structure that we can’t expect it to fade away. However, we can actively reframe it, though reframing is difficult with deeply embedded framing like racism and sexism. Consider how difficult it would be for highly chauvinistic men to regard women differently. That would require significant changes in their mentality and social relationships. With racism we face an extraordinarily difficult task. How do we know that racism can be reframed at all? Over time both the racist and sexist frames have changed significantly. The racial frame changed significantly in the 19^th and 20^th centuries resulting in the abolishment of slavery and the elimination of Jim Crow segregation. These changes did not come easily.

In this paper I’ve tried to reframe my own ideas about race and stimulate evaluators to reframe theirs. The aspiration is that evaluators can reduce potential racial biases in their thinking, in their evaluation practices, and in the programs and policies they evaluate. I’ve disclosed some of my personal racial framing with the story about the thief breaking into my parent’s boarding house when I was a few days old. However, like most people, my personal racial framing is more complex.

            In August 1862, my great grandfather joined the Union army, the same month he was married. He enlisted along with his brother-in-law, who died of small pox in Memphis. During the Civil War my great grandfather’s unit, Company A, 60^th Illinois Infantry Regiment, saw considerable military action in campaigns through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, led by Generals Grant and Sherman. The Great Western Army, as it was called, was successful in decisively defeating Confederate forces in the West and South, culminating in Sherman’s March to the Sea. The 60^th Illinois was part of Sherman’s army. My great grandfather was mustered out of the army in Louisville, Kentucky, July 3, 1865. Throughout his life he was very proud of his military service. At his request, he was buried on a high hill overlooking the Mississippi River, with only his name, rank of sergeant, and military unit engraved on his tombstone. No dates.

My grandmother was also proud of her father’s military service. When she was a little girl, her father sang the old Civil War marching songs to her and her siblings. After her oldest son, my father, was killed when I was four and my sister was two, my grandmother took care of us for four years. She lived with us, took care of us daily, and sang her father’s Civil War songs to us while my mother worked shift work in a munitions factory. Our grandmother was extremely close to us emotionally.

She was very patriotic, flying her American flag every national holiday. And she revered Abraham Lincoln. Even when her five sons became fervent Democrats supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, she argued with them vociferously, clinging to the Republican loyalties of her father. The downtown Alton riverfront was the scene of the last of the seven Lincoln Douglas debates in 1858 that gave Lincoln national prominence for his opposition to slavery and set him on the path to the Presidency in 1860.

While my father was still alive and I was three or four, my grandmother and other family members drove seventy miles north to Springfield to visit Lincoln’s Tomb. My father sat me on the lap of the seated statue of Lincoln, the life-sized model for the huge sculpture at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. During World War II, my grandmother proudly hung a two star banner in the window, honoring her two sons serving in the military.

Also, she would not sit next to an African American on a bus. If a black woman sat down next to her, she would move to another seat. Even for a white family living near the black community, this behavior was embarrassing. At the same time I cannot remember her saying or doing anything overtly demeaning to blacks other than this behavior. In fact, she was strongly dismissive of the Ku Klux Klan, which was powerfully influential in the state in the 1920s and 1930s. Years before, when she lived farther south in Carterville, Illinois, the police chief shot her dog because she rejected his amorous advances. (Apparently, she was a very attractive woman in her younger years). Full of anger she confronted the police chief at noon on the main street of town and castigated him publicly for his craven behavior, shouting, “Why don’t you go home and put a sheet over your head, so I can recognize you!” The police during the day were often Klan members after dark. She showed no fear of anyone. She always contended that Lincoln and her father fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves, a critical distinction in her mind (and one rejected by contemporary Civil War historians).

By contrast, I should note that my mother never exhibited racist behavior towards anyone. She was the best person I ever knew. Only a few times in her life did I hear her say anything derogatory about anyone, and on those occasions her ire had to do with someone who had injured her personally. A few families in her Baptist church confided in her that they had “crossed over the color line,” that they had African American ancestors they kept secret. Why they told her I don’t know, though they were close friends. The fact that they did tell her indicated tremendous confidence in her. If she had revealed their secret in those days, they would have been ostracized. She was a moral guide for me in many ways and a very trusting person, although I grew up much less trusting.

By the time I was a young man, I attributed my grandmother’s behavior to old-time, vestigial racism, which would disappear gradually as the older people passed away. Of course, I realized that racism hadn’t disappeared entirely. After all, James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King’s assassin, was from my hometown, and I attended school with some of the Ray boys. But King’s assassination was in 1968, nearly fifty years before Ferguson. The events at Ferguson, across the river, shocked me. Such events indicated that racism was still strong. I found this emotionally disturbing. Racism was not going to fade away gradually.

I reasoned there must be strong forces that actively created and recreated the racism. About that time Stafford Hood asked me to join a panel to discuss culturally responsive evaluation at the American Evaluation Association conference. I put together some personal experiences, observations of American society, and knowledge of the evaluation field (House, 2015). This paper is an attempt to explain the long-term persistence of racism, including how it’s recreated, sustained, and affects evaluation.

A few blocks from my grandmother’s stucco house on Cherry Street Alley, where recollections in my childhood memoir begin, is the Lovejoy Monument. The monument stands 110 feet tall in Alton cemetery atop a hill overlooking the Mississippi. It’s a memorial to a famed martyr in the abolition of slavery. In 1837 Elijah P. Lovejoy was the editor of a newspaper in Alton calling for the abolition of slavery. A pro-slavery mob broke into the warehouse where his printing press was hidden, killed Lovejoy, and threw his press into the river.

At the time the city was a bustling riverboat town and a cauldron of political intrigue about slavery. The city had an “underground railroad” that enabled runaway slaves to escape north. Missouri, across the river, was a slave state, and if slaves could make it to Alton, they had a chance to escape, but only if they received help and acted surreptitiously.

The city abounded in professional “slave catchers,” men hired to capture runaways. Many residents were pro-slavery. Many had come from the South and others thought the abolitionists hurt their business. Lovejoy started his abolitionist newspaper in St Louis. Mobs there destroyed his printing press twice before he moved. In Alton a mob attacked the building housing the press, set it on fire, and killed Lovejoy, who died defending himself and his press with a gun. News of Lovejoy’s killing reverberated through the country and had effects far beyond what one might have imagined. His assassination became a major symbolic event that mobilized the abolitionist movement.

In Feelings in History, Ramsay MacMullen (2003) contends that the actions individuals take are often motivated by strong personal feelings and that historians routinely ignore these motivations when they write histories. His main examples are the people who nurtured the anti-slavery movement. Initially, only the Quakers opposed slavery. The anti-slavery advocates were fervent in their beliefs and vivid in expression. They became a powerful political influence. The Lovejoy story was an important part of that movement.

“… the sheer magnitude of antislavery’s place in the nation’s history, igniting the flame…beneath the cauldron which was before long to boil over into a great war. The martyr Lovejoy’s name…draws us into the stream of cause and effect” (MacMullen 2003 p 100).

“The shots fired in Alton on November 7, 1837, would be… the beginning of the Civil War (M. Rugoff, quoted in Simon, 1994, p 154).

“…an eyewitness to the violent drama in Alton gave his account, broken by tears, and John Brown in the audience rose to say one sentence, ‘Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery’” (MacMullen 2003, p 127).

Many across the country were converted to the anti-slavery cause by the story of Lovejoy. Tributes to him appeared in hundreds of newspapers. What seemed to motivate people was indignation. In their view Lovejoy was doing the right thing for the right reason and was killed for doing the right thing. His assassination was disproportional to his efforts to persuade others via the printed word; people were outraged. Different motivations led to a radical movement based mostly in evangelical churches.

MacMullen contends that by reading and hearing vivid reports from that time, readers can understand the motivations of those involved. The advocates of the anti-slavery movement were articulate in revealing their inner thoughts. “The major part of the indictment could be offered in the printed words of the Southern states themselves, showing the casual and common mutilation of slaves, permanent scarring from flogging or other punishment, breaking up of families, pursuit of fugitives either to capture or kill them, light penalties or none for the torture or killing of slaves, harsh penalties for the education of slaves….” (MacMullen, 2003, p. 109).

Strong feelings were also incited on the pro-slavery side. Evangelical churches carried the speaking burden of the anti-slavery movement, and abolitionist speakers were often attacked by pro-slavery mobs. Mob actions were one index of the provocation that the defenders of slavery felt. From 1834 to 1837, there were 157 instances of mob actions in the North, the worst in Connecticut. Frequently under assault, William Lloyd Garrison anticipated the fatalism of Martin Luther King: “As for myself, whatever may be my fate—whether I fall in the springtime of manhood by the hand of the assassin or be immured in a Georgia cell, or be permitted to live to a ripe old age---I know that the success of the [abolitionist] cause depends nothing upon my existence” (MacMullen, 2003, p 121).

            The anti-slavery movement began with only a few individuals feeling outraged. Through their actions and zeal, slavery was eventually abolished with the advent of the Civil War. “…it was made plain in the findings of science that the distinction between mind and heart, in laymen’s terms, or between intellect and emotion, or even reason and impulse, cannot in truth be supported. The materials of mind, intellect, reason are wrapped in or half-composed of feelings; and necessarily so for the survival of the species” (MacMullen, p 134).

The slavery issue came to a political focus in the seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephan Douglas, who were campaigning for an Illinois Senate seat in 1858. The final debate was in Alton a few hundred yards from where Lovejoy was killed. Here’s Lincoln’s statement.

“That is the real issue…. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn the bread, and I’ll eat it.’ [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle….” (A. Lincoln, 1858, in Johnson 2001 p. 79-80).

What does the abolition of slavery suggest about reframing? It shows that the racial frame was changed partly by stories. Just as the story about the thief breaking into my parent’s boarding house carried the message of the racial frame, the stories of the abolitionist movement changed the racial frame. The white racial frame was constructed through stories created and spread by local governing elites to justify the exploitation of Africans and other minorities. Abolitionists spread stories about the brutality of slavery and mistreatment of slaves. The movement swung sentiments in the north towards abolition. They motivated people to take radical actions that endangered their lives.

In Making Stories Jerome Bruner (2002) emphasizes that people necessarily see the world in terms of stories or narratives. Stories motivate people and drive them to action: “We should not write off this power of story to shape everyday experience as simply another error in our human effort to make sense of the world…. Indeed, we refer to events and things and people by expressions that situate them not just in an indifferent world but in a narrative one: ‘heroes” to whom we give medals for ‘valor’, ‘broken contracts’ where one party has failed to show ‘good-faith effort…. Heroes and broken contracts can be referred to only by virtue of their prior existence in a narrative world….” (Bruner, 2002, p. 7-8).

Bruner notes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played as great a role in precipitating the Civil War as debates in Congress. A century later the writers of the Harlem Renaissance set the stage for the anti-segregation ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. They vividly portrayed what it was like to live in Jim Crow segregation (Bruner, 2002, p. 10). Few can read Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) without feeling a strong sense of indignation and injustice at how which the main character is humiliated, insulted, and abused day after day. The book creates a claustrophobic sense of desperation with no way out. The boy’s constant abuse is a method of keeping him in his place, a blatant manifestation of racial framing in action. Readers can also feel the horror of slavery through Toni Morrison’s powerful novel Beloved (1987), in her terms a narrative of African Americans, not one written for them. Stories are fundamental to the way we perceive and conceive the world.

There are many kinds of stories: personal stories, history stories, legal stories, and financial stories. The stories about my family are personal stories, the Lovejoy saga a history story, and Brown versus Board of Education, a legal story. A legal story is a story told before a court of law that tells about some act alleged by one party to have been committed by another party that damaged the accuser and was in violation of statutes prohibiting such acts. Law courts render verdicts that aspire to be accepted as authoritative, fair, and rising above self-interest. Perceived fairness depends on litigation procedures presumed to ensure standards of justice. These include the rules of evidence, the kinds of stories permissible in court, and how the stories can be told and interpreted (Bruner, 2002, pp. 37-38).

Finally, there are evaluation stories, which I’ve discussed elsewhere (House, 1980, Chapter 5). Every evaluation must have a minimum degree of coherence. The minimum coherence is that the evaluation tell a story. There must be an explicit or tacit sequence of events or interpretation of events for readers to use the evaluation as a guide to valuing. There also may be recommendations, but the recommendations are not necessary. The story is.

There are two conventional ways to present evaluation stories. The first is to present the evaluator as an impartial, scientific observer. The story line is often tacit, something like, “I’m a detached neutral observer who has made measurements according to the canons of science and have found certain things to be so.” In establishing this voice, the evaluator specifies methodological procedures to enhance the credibility of the study. Another way of telling the story is for evaluators to stand closer to the program, as reflected in the evaluator’s voice, and describe events in greater detail, sometimes quoting the words of program participants and observers, a mode often used in qualitative studies.

Every story requires the minimum of an agent who performs an action to achieve a goal in a setting by certain means (Kenneth Burke, cited in Bruner, 2003). The story relates events to each other in specific ways, such as in cause and effect relationships. The story differs from a chronology in that stories consist of inferences and interpretations. The events are integrated with each other, and the parts are ordered to the whole. Coherence is a key concept here. Incoherent evaluations don’t make sense. Ordinarily, the evaluator is making an argument in developing the evaluation and trying to be persuasive in establishing the credibility of the evaluator, the evaluation, and the conclusions. It’s critical that evaluation stories be valid in the ways we recognize as legitimate in the evaluation community.

Evaluation Theory and Racial Framing

I began this paper with the story of the police shooting of an unarmed African American man in Ferguson. The shooting provoked mass protests. The incident was an ugly reminder that racism in America is still extremely potent (Williams, 2016, Duneier, 2016). After five centuries, how has racism persisted as such a strong force? And what implication does that have for professional evaluation? I advanced three suppositions.

First, in a society that sees itself as democratic, and which is democratic in many ways, but is also racist and does not realize the full extent or nature of the racism, the society will promulgate programs and policies that purport to help the affected minorities, but many programs and policies will damage those minorities significantly. Much racism is conveyed covertly. We should strive to more fully understand the extent and nature of racism in society, and we should identify aspects of programs and policies that promote it.

Second, racism in America is not a simple vestige of the past. Rather American racism is created and recreated in the present by identifiable entities, processes, and mechanisms. We should discover, examine, and reveal those entities that create racism, especially those that impact evaluation studies. Racial framing is one of the entities that convey racist ideas. I’ve examined racial framing in considerable detail so that evaluators will better understand its structure, origins, and how it works. We should be able to recognize its patterns and manifestations.

Third, evaluation is not a cause of racism, but for racist processes to have their effects, the evaluation function must be distorted, coopted, or corrupted. Honest, critical evaluations will reveal racist effects. Evaluations are neutralized in various ways to permit racist tendencies to prevail. Evaluators must protect evaluations against biasing factors if evaluation is to perform a critical role.

As with most complex social phenomena, many causal factors interact to produce racial discrimination. These factors overlap and reinforce one another. Removing one doesn’t eliminate racism because other factors slide into place to replace it. Racist effects are produced by mutually reinforcing factors acting simultaneously and sequentially. No single factor is responsible, nor is there one solution that can eliminate racism altogether. Rather, racism is embedded deeply in the social structure, and the causal factors are interwoven. Alexander (2013) compares racist social structures to birdcages. If you look at only one wire, the bird is free to escape, but when all the wires are interwoven and interconnected, escape becomes impossible. This interlocking feature makes racism extremely difficult to eliminate.

Nonetheless, evaluators can play an important role. The role should be to conduct honest, truthful evaluations of programs and policies to the best of our ability and to protect the integrity of evaluations. This conception of evaluation is based on the idea that humans are natural evaluators. Indeed, the basis of human thinking is evaluative. Thinking processes have evolved to enable humans to evaluate their environment. These processes are complex and contain biases and peculiarities. Professional evaluators are expert in conducting evaluations and using special methods to minimize biases. However, some biases are not adequately recognized and redressed. One of these is racial framing. Another is conflict of interest. Evaluators are vulnerable.

How does this analysis fit with evaluation theory? Biases and mental framing have been central interests in both evaluation and cognitive research. Both disciplines have gained important insights by studying biases (House, 2016, 2015). Researchers like Kahneman and Tversky (Kahneman, 2011) analyzed biases in everyday thinking. Campbell and Stanley devised a scheme to arrive at causal inferences by identifying potential biases and mitigating their effects (House, 2011). Scriven pursued his conception of evaluation by looking for biases that might affect outcomes.

Systematic biases that both evaluators and researchers recognize include improper framing, such as casting evaluation criteria too narrowly; relying on incomplete evidence, such as omitting critical data; seeking only data that confirm, such as halo effects; failing to look for negative instances; improper priming, such as being directed mostly by information from sponsors and program directors; and over confidence about conclusions.

In addition, we should also consider biases that affect evaluators personally. We should look for biases that evaluators might harbor in their beliefs, dispositions, and behavior. There is strong evidence to indicate that such biases can affect findings significantly (House, 2011).

More positively, Stanovich (2010) has proposed that System 2 thinking should be further divided into algorithmic and reflective thinking. Reflective thinking is similar to critical thinking. In my view, reflective thinking dispositions should play critical roles in evaluation. These dispositions include,

“… the tendency to collect information before making up one’s mind, the tendency to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion, the disposition to think extensively about a problem before responding, the tendency to calibrate the degree of strength of one’s opinion to the degrees of evidence available, the tendency to think about future consequences before taking action, the tendency to explicitly weigh pluses and minuses of situations before making a decision, and the tendency to seek nuance and avoid absolutism” (Stanovich, 2010, p. 36).

I would add one more disposition. Ordinarily, evaluators have a single framework they employ in conducting evaluations. Reflective thinking entails being able to perceive, consider, and act on two or more frameworks simultaneously and to reframe situations when advantageous. Flexibility in framing and reframing is a critical aspect of rationality. Expert evaluators should be sophisticated enough to use multiple frameworks to guide them instead of relying on a single template. Reality is often too complex to be captured by one framework. In a sense, reflectivity is a supra-evaluative set of skills that supplements and cross checks the evaluator’s approach.

In Evaluating with Validity, I expanded the conception of validity by contending that evaluations should be true, coherent, and just (House, 1980). Untrue, incoherent, and unjust evaluations are invalid. I explicated these three dimensions, with truth determined through argumentation, coherence manifested in images, frames, stories, and metaphors, and justice exercised through principles of social justice. The expanded conception of validity consisted of multiple frames held in mind simultaneously. Although multiple framing sounds overly complex, we employ multiple frames all the time when we engage in conversations. We have great capacity for doing so. We should make use of this capacity by discerning racial framing when it occurs.

Implications for Evaluation

Some reviewers of this paper have suggested that I add advice for evaluators. My analysis has been primarily a consciousness raising effort in the belief that if evaluators absorb the history and stories of these events, they will be primed to identify racial framing. And they may begin reframing their ideas about race. From my perspective, giving advice should be a collective, professional responsibility open to all. We can add ideas about what to do collectively over time. Others may well have better ideas than I do. I ask readers to contribute their ideas.

--What’s the proper role for evaluators? We didn’t start racism and we can’t stop it. In the conception of racism I’ve advanced, some programs, policies, and studies help recreate racism. We should closely examine programs and policies that affect minorities for signs of racism and outcomes that damage minorities. Some effects may be long-term and difficult to discern.

--Evaluators should take advantage of the good advice that already exists. That includes two books of readings about culturally responsive evaluation (Hood, Hopson, and Frierson, 2015, 2005) and the AEA cultural competence guidelines. Culturally responsive evaluation urges evaluators to become better informed about the minority cultures in which they conduct evaluations.

--Those interested in the history of race in America might read new books on racism, such as those I’ve referenced. They contain new information and analyses. The conception of racism I’ve presented is not the common majority view. A more conventional view sees racism as limited to people in a few regions, mostly among the less educated, and anticipate that it will fade away eventually. By contrast, the view here is that racism is deeply embedded in the institutions of society and actively recreated by powerful social forces. It will not fade away. The history that many of us learned was based on highly selective collective remembering and forgetting. We can’t change history, but we can be better informed about the forces that shaped racial events. Many forces are still active. I’ve been struck by how similar some current events seem to those long ago.

--I don’t believe that simple sensitivity workshops can be very successful in effecting change, any more than they can eliminate sexism. The problem is more profound and socially embedded, and workshops tend to be too superficial. Something deeper is required. Recent research suggests that the implicit racial associations of teachers have significant effects on teacher behavior and student performance. Perhaps experimenting with ways of changing implicit biases will yield more effective strategies (Warikoo, Sinclair, Fei, Jacoby-Senghor, 2016).

--We might also seek to discover and analyze the underlying causal entities, mechanisms, and processes that produce racism, especially those affecting evaluation. Racial framing is one such factor. My aspiration is that understanding racial framing’s structure and origins will result in awareness and change.

--We should understand the pernicious and automated character of racial framing that leads us to interpret the world in certain ways. Racial framing doesn’t necessarily entail having malicious intentions towards minorities. We can have very good intentions, and yet be influenced in ways that cause damage.

--Racial framing can mask true effects. For example, readers sometimes accept faulty evaluations and policy studies because the conclusions of the studies reaffirm the white racial frame, even when the data and analyses do not. Readers accept biased findings without closely inspecting the flawed analyses underpinning the studies (House and Madura, 1988).

--Every evaluation tells a story. Evaluators should ask, “What story does this evaluation tell overall?” If the story is similar to the racial frame, inspect the details of the study carefully. It may be that the evaluation is valid, but that should be confirmed by close examination.

--We should look for racial framing in evaluations and studies others conduct. We need to assist colleagues in this regard and to seek assistance from them in our work.

--A common error of evaluations is that the conclusions of the study don’t fit the data on which they’re based. This is more likely when the evaluations involve minorities. We need to weigh the empirical evidence carefully against the conclusions. Inferences from data to conclusions are particularly susceptible to bias because they’re based on more background knowledge than just the study.

--Another technique is to employ a collaborator approach to evaluating. Having a collaborator who is part of the minority group and well informed about the cultural setting can enhance the validity of the study. Paul Brandon, who spent many years doing studies in the Kamehameha schools, says he would never attempt studies in Hawaii without a Native Hawaiian collaborator. Team approaches are a good way to go.

--Democratic evaluation is another option. The principles of deliberative democratic evaluations are inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation. Evaluators design the evaluation to include major stakeholders, promote extensive dialogue with and between stakeholders, and establish deliberative processes to arrive at conclusions carefully considered. I’ve discussed this approach elsewhere and in a detailed case study of evaluating a Denver bilingual program. I formed a committee including stakeholders who helped guide the evaluation (House, 2015). The aspiration is that the perspectives, values, and interests of stakeholders will be reflected in the evaluation.

--We should also seek to critique the distortion, cooptation, and corruption of evaluations in other areas. Evaluations can be distorted, such as with the Ferguson police, or coopted, as with police actions in Chicago, where the accountability board refused to find anything wrong, or corrupted, as with some evaluations of pharmaceutical drugs.

----There is a long history of scholarship in the sciences and social sciences that legitimates racism. Some of this scholarship has been done by the leading scholars of their day. Scholarly reputation is no protection against racial bias. That tradition continues. Think tanks funded by wealthy donors sponsor biased studies that support the sponsor’s political agendas, such as eliminating programs benefiting minorities (Mayer, 2016).

--What about future work? I’ve explored the nature of racial framing at length. Racial framing is the DNA of racism, passed on from generation to generation. If we understand its structure and patterns, we can imagine ways to reshape it.  Work still to be done includes how racial framing interacts with other factors, such as segregation, police behavior, and the conditions of the white working class.

--Stories and narratives are key shaping factors in framing and reframing processes. Stories and frames are integral components of the vocabulary of action.

            We have had over 500 years of racism in America. The destructive effects can hardly be exaggerated. Unless we take insightful, concerted action, we will have 500 more. Of course, the problem is much larger than evaluation. But evaluators can do things that make a significant difference.

 

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