ABSTRACT
Ethical and political issues raised by racial difference and the formation of racial categories in the USA are important to western feminist theory for several reasons. Race, like gender, is largely a product of oppressive social construction in cultures dominated by white men. Beginning in the eighteenth century, western Europeans and Americans believed that racial difference had a foundation in human biology that in turn determined the psychology and culture of members of different races. The lack of a fixed set of traits for each so- called race means that race cannot be inherited as is commonly thought. Rather, the specific physical characteristics variably associated with races in cultural contexts are inherited through family descent, as is the rest of human biology. Race therefore supervenes on human genealogy or family inheritance. Non-white women have insisted that they speak for themselves rather than conform to representation by white feminists.
