ABSTRACT
My argument in this book is that race shapes white women’s lives. In the same way that both men’s and women’s lives are shaped by their gender, and that both heterosexual and lesbian women’s experiences in the world are marked by their sexuality, white people and people of color live racially structured lives. In other words, any system of differentiation shapes those on whom it bestows privilege as well as those it oppresses. White people are “raced,” just as men are “gendered.” And in a social context where white people have too often viewed themselves as nonracial or racially neutral, it is crucial to look at the “racialness” of white experience. Through life history interviews, the book examines white women’s places in the racial structure of the United States at the end of the twentieth century and views white women’s lives as sites both for the reproduction of racism and for challenges to it.
