How Americans Make Race
Stories, Institutions, Spaces

This book looks at why people keep using identities even after the stories from which they were constructed have been rejected.

Clarissa Rile Hayward (Author)

9781107619586, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 October 2013

226 pages
22.6 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.29 kg

"In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Hayward incisively illuminates how and why Americans have constructed grotesquely segregated metropolitan areas that foster vile fables of racial differences and harsh realities of racial inequalities. A riveting and all-too-persuasive analysis." –Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

How do people produce and reproduce identities? In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward challenges what is sometimes called the 'narrative identity thesis': the idea that people produce and reproduce identities as stories. Identities have greater staying power than one would expect them to have if they were purely and simply narrative constructions, she argues, because people institutionalize identity-stories, building them into laws, rules, and other institutions that give social actors incentives to perform their identities well, and because they objectify identity-stories, building them into material forms that actors experience with their bodies. Drawing on in-depth historical analyses of the development of racialized identities and spaces in the twentieth-century United States, and also on life-narratives collected from people who live in racialized urban and suburban spaces, Hayward shows how the institutionalization and objectification of racial identity-stories enables their practical reproduction, lending them resilience in the face of challenge and critique.

Introduction. Comme il faut
1. Identities and stories
2. Black places
3. Ordinary stories
4. Home, sweet home
5. White fences
Conclusion: stories, institutions, and spaces
Appendix. Interview respondents and interview schedule.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB]