1 It is not, and never has been, true that the Hyaenidae is a family distinguished by scavenging. 2  Of the four species alive today-the Aardwolf and the Spotted, Striped and Brown Hyaenas-only the latter two are full-time scavengers.
In other words, the legal construction of white and non-white in U.S. history is one engine that drives the way that the past continues to shape the present. Whiteness has been made to appear natural, that is, as objective scientific fact, in U.S. cultural and legal history.
Indeed, in more recent years, social constructionists have asserted that gender is entirely a social construct. The rules by which, for example, biological women navigate the world are products of a given society and, indeed, they vary between societies.