Review How Americans make race: Stories, institutions and spaces Clarissa Hayward Oxford University Press, New York, 2013, 212pp., $28.99 / £17.10, ISBN: 1107619580 Contemporary Political Theory (2015) 14, e201–e204. doi:10.1057/cpt.2014.17; published online 21 October 2014 Critics, commentators and scholars of racial inequality have come to face what is becoming an increasingly thorny problem. On the one hand, empirics continue to bear out the despairing variety of manifestations of racial inequality. Whether it concerns income and job opportunity, access to health care, adverse interactions with the law, or housing segregation (to name but a few), racial inequality is a rock-solid fact of American social, political and economic life. In a positivist-minded country that seems to live by the slogan ‘the numbers don’t lie’, one would think the entailing moral arguments to then attend to racial inequality would be on safe ground. It is not so. On the other hand of the facts there are the perceived norms: that racism is wrong, and that blacks should have equal rights. And because these norms have themselves also become, in a manner of speaking, facts of American life, one can sense that one is losing his or her audience when race is cited as a causal factor in racial inequality. Maybe more disappointingly, audience members turned interlocutors often move to paint a coat of hysteria on the claim ‘it’s racial’, making the project of establishing the racial quality of racial injustice inordinately difficult. There is a real need for work that can demystify what is intended by the claim ‘it’s racial’ when referring to inequality. Clarissa Hayward’s How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, and Spaces proves to be an important ally for critical commentators in demystifying what is racial about at least one form of racial inequality – residential spaces – and additionally it has the independent virtue of telling its own important story about the false pretenses under which Americans continue to extol property-owning as a great virtue. As a good book title often does, Hayward’s gives us all the major markers we need to grasp the vision of her book. Her central ambition is to describe and delineate for readers the ways Americans have reified the category of race by telling or accepting identity stories that have either infiltrated or originated in major institutions that themselves have shaped America’s residential thus sociological landscape. The use © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 14, 2, e201–e204 www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/