
Clarissa Rile Hayward
About Clarissa
Hayward is a political theorist whose work centers on questions of power and freedom, racial justice, democracy, political aspects of education, and the American city. Her most recent book, How Americans Make Race, is about the “stickiness” of racial identity: about why people use racial identities even after rejecting the stories from which they were made. Her book draws 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. It shows how racial identities are reproduced and explains why they are resilient in the face of challenge and critique.