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The Common Reader. July, 2018In the spring of 1968, Larman and Geraldine Williams were among the first black homebuyers in Ferguson, Missouri. Larman Williams, a public school principal, worked in the Wellston district, one of just two school districts in St. Louis County with a majority black population. A few years back, the Williams family had […]

Abstract: This article engages Rainer Forst’s account of structural power, as elaborated in Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification. Its central claim is that structural power works, not only through what Forst calls ‘justificatory narratives’, but also through institutionalized and objectified social norms. When norms are institutionalized, they define incentive structures, which people internalize

On Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the the Democratic Party and Timothy Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United KingdomAt the time of this writing, six months have passed since Donald Trump’s populist grab of what many assumed, going into the 2016 election, was

Abstract: This article brings into conversation two important literatures in contemporary political theory that have, for the most part, failed to engage one another: work spanning more than two decades on multiculturalism and identity politics, and neo-republican work on nondomination. The authors take as their starting-point two widely endorsed claims: that identities are constructs and that

Clarissa Rile Hayward is a contemporary political theorist whose work focuses on theories of power, democratic theory, theories of identity, and American urban politics. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Washington University and Affiliate Faculty in Washington University’s Department of Philosophy and Programs in American Culture Studies and Urban Studies. She received

Abstract: This essay tackles the thorny question of how to dismantle structural racial injustice.Charles Mills’s work on what Mills calls white epistemologies of ignorance to challenge Young’s emphasis on changing how racially privileged people understand their responsibilities. It makes the case that disruptive politics play a crucial role in dismantling structural injustice. Because they interrupt

Two years ago today, unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s death has since become a marker: shorthand for an array of urban and suburban ills, including persistent economic and racial segregation, the racial divide in social and economic opportunities and outcomes, police

Hayward crafts a rich and cogent theory of how racial identity is reproduced not merely discursively but materially. Hayward’s book not only enriches renowned accounts of the architecture of American apartheid and the entrenchment of a “possessive investment in whiteness, her nonideal theories of how bad racial stories influence our movement through space and how

(Article in The Washington Post, April 2015) If you are a homeowner filing your income taxes, you’re probably pleased with your home mortgage interest tax deduction. As you may know, the federal government lets homeowners write off interest payments on mortgages of up to $1 million https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/04/15/why-does-the-u-s-use-public-revenue-to-support-private-home-ownership/

(with Lynn Oldham and Laura Rosenbury), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 26, 2014. https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/what-now-three-ways-to-tackle-structural-injustice/article_160cb7c7-8a56-5d36-a93a-7e2948095bab.html