How Americans Make Race Stories, Institutions, Spaces [Paperback]

This book looks at why people keep using identities even after the stories from which they were constructed have been rejected.This is a book about the stickiness of identity: about why people continue to use identities even after they have rejected the stories from which those identities were constructed. Its focus is racial identities in the contemporary United States, which, it argues, were institutionalized (built into laws, rules, and other institutions) and objectified (built into material forms, such as racialized urban and suburban space). It uses historical analysis and life-history interviews to show how the institutionalization and objectification of racial stories makes them sticky, even when they're challenged and critiqued.This is a book about the stickiness of identity: about why people continue to use identities even after they have rejected the stories from which those identities were constructed. Its focus is racial identities in the contemporary United States, which, it argues, were institutionalized (built into laws, rules, and other institutions) and objectified (built into material forms, such as racialized urban and suburban space). It uses historical analysis and life-history interviews to show how the institutionalization and objectification of racial stories makes them sticky, even when they're challenged and critiqued.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 l£'