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.
The beauty-is-a-social construction is one of the foundational tenets of social constructivism whether you wish to acknowledge that fact or not. I was making the point that Dr. Albers' post did not recognize that both universal as well as culture-specific metrics are operative when defining beauty.