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.
In The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen writes that it is time for white America to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question at the heart of color. It's time for white people to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the problem.