Race Trumps Common Sense: The segregated mindset of the White Racial Frame

By Reggie Jackson, Milwaukee Independent

Common Sense: the ability to use good judgment in making decisions and to live in a reasonable and safe way.

As Americans we take pride in being very sensible people and think that most of us are in the same boat as everyone else when it comes to common sense. Those lacking common sense are see, as oddballs. I have proposed for years that common sense is not very common.

For the past 411 years, since the first British colonists arrived in Jamestown, those original settlers have been described as the founders of the New World. We all learned in history class that these settlers made the sacrifices that allowed this Republic to be founded as a nation independent of the British crown.

We have been taught a specific mythology about those forefathers. All Americans were taught in school the myth that the British settlers established “civilization” in a place where it did not exist before. We ignore the fact that the indigenous people of the land invaded by those colonists had well-established civilized societies, which helped the early settler survive in a harsh new environment. The myth is a part of the story of America.

The Jamestown colonists never referred to themselves as white in any of the primary documents historians have analyzed. They referred to themselves as Christians. The concept of whiteness had not been created yet. The current idea of race had not been created yet. The concept of race at that time was more aligned with what we would now call ethnicity. As the idea of race developed in America, it was because of a battle over who could legally be enslaved…

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