Clarissa Rile Hayward is a political theorist and professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis focussing on questions central to political life. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University, and her latest book is How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (2013, Cambridge University Press). Her article “Disruption: What Is It Good For?” recently appeared in The Journal of Politics.
Real democracy, or “rule by the people” is not just about voting to elect public officials, campaigning for parties and candidates, and engaging in debates about the issues of the day. It is also about ordinary people—people like the early twentieth-century suffragists, the striking auto workers of the 1930s, the Freedom Riders of the Jim Crow South, and the Black Lives Matter activists of 2020—exercising their political power to fight for change.
Half a century after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, residential racial segregation and spatial isolation endure. Change has been slow, and it has been uneven.