We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

Jeff Chang

Picador (2016)

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Tags: Social Science, Minority Studies, Discrimination & Race Relations, Essays

Social Sciencettt Minority Studiesttt Discrimination & Race Relationsttt Essaysttt

In these provocative, powerful essays acclaimed writer/journalist Jeff Chang (
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Who We Be
) takes an incisive and wide-ranging look at the recent tragedies and widespread protests that have shaken the country. Through deep reporting with key activists and thinkers, passionately personal writing, and distinguished cultural criticism,
We Gon’ Be Alright
links #BlackLivesMatter to #OscarsSoWhite, Ferguson to Washington D.C., the Great Migration to resurgent nativism. Chang explores the rise and fall of the idea of “diversity,” the roots of student protest, changing ideas about Asian Americanness, and the impact of a century of racial separation in housing. He argues that resegregation is the unexamined condition of our time, the undoing of which is key to moving the nation forward to racial justice and cultural equity.

**

Review

"There is history and analysis in these pages, and there is life and experience, too, but neither form of storytelling overpowers the other. Instead, what comes through most clearly is a versatile mind in the service of a painful and protracted story, an author who ranges widely before drawing tough conclusions and one who, despite the book’s optimistic title, appears deeply pessimistic about things getting any better, much less becoming all right...The limits of representation come alive in the author’s unforgettable discussion of the Asian American experience."―
The Washington Post

"In the song that inspired the author’s title, Kendrick Lamar repeatedly asks his listeners, 'Do you feel me?' Chang’s text, in essence, poses the same question. Enriched and stimulated as much by his passion as his ideas, I’m pleased to answer with a resounding yes."―Jabari Asim,
Bookforum

“When absorbed individually, the author's incisive essays will educate and inform readers. Collectively, Chang creates a chain-linked manifesto arguing for an end to racially charged violence and discrimination and urging global open-mindedness to the struggle of the oppressed. … A compelling and intellectually thought-provoking exploration of the quagmire of race relations.”―
Kirkus Reviews
(starred)

"[Carries] the conversation about race in America right into 2016. Each essay is both critically sharp and deeply affecting―both heavy with statistics and rich with evocative descriptions."―*East Bay Express *

"Incredible! It's a small book, but it packs a big punch."―
BookRiot

“With simple, elegant prose coupled with remarkable scholarship, Jeff Chang’s
We Gon' Be Alright
, moves us beyond autobiography into an illuminated landscape of penetrating facts and underlining unavoidable truths. In these pages, one learns the meaning and devastating effects of resegregation, inequity, and the systems of power that maintain them. Connecting the dots from federal housing policies of the 1960's and the sparks of Ferguson to the political rise of Donald Trump and the bittersweet sorrow of Beyoncé’s
Lemonade
,
We Gon' Be Alright
captures the crisis of this historical moment even as it propels us toward action for a future we can only imagine. It’s been a long while since 'just the facts, please' was a real page-turner. For anyone interested in the realities shaping the cultural landscape, read it and share it. The clarity of vision is unparalleled. Chang has truly nailed it!” ―Carrie Mae Weems, visual artist

“Race has been fraught since its invention; this is to be expected of an enduring fiction that draws real blood. When it comes to navigating the minefields of race―its myths and material consequences, its currents and contradictions―Jeff Chang is a maestro. With eloquence and urgency,
We Gon’ Be Alright
reveals a country whose deepening racial oppression and inequality is shrouded by myths of colorblindness and postracial triumphalism. Diversity trumps equity, racial innocence trumps history, gentrification trumps resegregation, performance trumps power, and a Trump America trumps any possibility of a liberated America. But reversing course, Chang tells us, requires truth and reconciliation, struggle and transfiguration, and a movement governed by love and full of grace.” ―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“There is no more fitting writer to chronicle an unprecedented moment in American history than Jeff Chang.
We Gon’ Be Alright
is a seminal work about now, about who we are and who we are becoming.” ―Jose Antonio Vargas, Founder and CEO of
Define American

“Jeff Chang’s
We Gon’ Be Alright
is an astonishing and thorough account of how decades of struggle and protest have led us to Ferguson, to Black Lives Matter, to questions of equity and diversity, and to a country that is more segregated than ever. In the midst of our tense racial debates, this book is required reading. We would do well to heed its lessons.”―Michael Eric Dyson

"Chang’s prose is disarming, provocative, and sure to inspire further thought and research."―
Booklist

About the Author

JEFF CHANG
is the author of
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
and
Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post–Civil Rights America
. He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and the winner of the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He is the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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In appreciation of all the young people who would not bow down

… And all of this for you is fuel

like September
kiawe
.

You vow to write so hard

the paper burns

INTRODUCTION

THE CRISIS CYCLE

We are living in serious times. Since 2012, the names of the fallen—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, the list never seems to cease—have catalyzed collective outrage and grief. In the waning years of a Black presidency, we saw a proliferation of images of Black people killed in the streets and the rise of a national justice movement to affirm that Black lives matter.

Young people who grew up exemplars of post-1965 American diversity while attending schools that were dramatically resegregating have taken to the streets and the university quads to march against their own invisibility and demand a renewed attention to questions of equity.

And even the machines of our culture industries, which for the past twenty years have tried to assure us that our rainbow nation is indeed a happy one, have found their gears ground down by popular protests led by people of color against their lack of access, representation, and power.

In
Who We Be
, I wrote about visual culture and what I called the paradox of the “post-racial” moment—that while our images depict a nation moving toward desegregation, our indices reveal growing resegregation and inequity. The book was published a month before the announcement of the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, the idea that there had ever been a post-racial moment has come to seem naive, even desperately so.

Once the embodiment of hope, Obama leaves office publicly regretting his inability to reconcile the country’s polarization. At the same time, Donald Trump focuses the anxieties loosed by white vulnerability—an inchoate, inescapable sense that the social and economic present and future of whites will only get worse—onto the bodies of migrants, Muslims, Blacks, women, and all those others who do not deserve the gift of America. Like climate change, the culture wars seem to have become an enduring feature of our daily lives, the permanent fog of a country that repeats the spectacle of fire in every generation.

Polls show that more Americans are concerned about race relations now than at any time since 1992, the year of the Los Angeles riots. The previous peak had come in 1965—the year of the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the apex of the civil rights movement, the year of the last national consensus for racial justice.

1965 was also the year of Malcolm X’s assassination and the Watts riots. It was the beginning of the post–civil rights era, an era that has been defined by a vital culture reshaped under demographic change but a politics mobilized around racial backlash. That historic arc—of an explosion of cultural expression that moved us forward toward mutual recognition amidst a cascade of regressive policies, laws, and political maneuvers that pushed us backward toward inequality and resegregation—was my focus in
Who We Be
. Over the past two years, it seems even clearer that we as a nation are caught in a bad loop of history—from 1965 to 1992 to right now.

Race makes itself known in crisis, in the singular event that captures a larger pattern of abuse and pain. We react to crisis with a flurry of words and, sometimes, actions. In turn, the reaction sparks its own backlash of outrage, justification, and denial. The cycle turns next toward exhaustion, complacency, and paralysis. And before long, we find ourselves back in crisis.

Racism is not merely about individual chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry. Ruth Gilmore reminds us that it is about the ways different groups are “vulnerable to premature death,” whether at the hands of the state or the structures that kill.
¹