ABSTRACT
This chapter analysis the white women's childhoods is organized around what it call social geographies of race', and explores the ways racism as a system helps shape our daily environments, trying to identify the historical, social and political processes that brought these environments into being. It explores the ways racism shapes white women's lives, the impact of race privilege on white women's experience and consciousness. Just as both men's and women's lives are shaped by their gender, and both heterosexual and lesbian women's experiences in the world are marked by their sexuality, white people and people of colour live racially structured lives. For the last two decades and more, women of colour have worked to transform feminism, challenging white feminists' inattention to race and other differences between women, and the falsely universalizing claims of much second wave' feminist analysis.
