We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (25 page)

I am grateful for the patience, hard work, joy, and humor of my staff and community at Institute for Diversity in the Arts past and present, for my comrades-in-arms Jerome Reyes and Atheel El-Malik, for my teaching assistants Natasha Mmonatau, Yinshi Lerman-Tan, Vivian Lu, Katharine Schwab, Bojan Srbinovski, Casey Wong, and for all of my TAs and students past and present. I am inspired by the Stanford Who’s Teaching Us Coalition. Over the years at Stanford, I feel like I’m the one who has been taught and mentored.

For over a decade, I took what amounted to a master class in cultural equity through Roberta Uno’s invitation to be part of the Future Aesthetics cohort. I have lots of love for my fellow mentees—Kristen Calhoun, Clyde Valentin, Carlton Turner, Rennie Harris, Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz, James Kass, Beth Boone, and Sylvia Sherman. We continued the cycle this past year with the Future Aesthetics documentation team—thank you to Jakeya Caruthers, K.K. Aoki Izu, and all of the super-researchers. I’m also grateful to Jakeya for all the tutoring. Thank you to the Surdna Foundation and the Ford Foundation for the generous support. Big love always to the CultureStr/ke crew, the Culture Group alums, the ArtChangeUS staff, MMAP, EPAA, and my Lavin family, you all give me life.

I’m deeply grateful to the close friends and mentors who read this book in parts or as a whole: Hua Hsu, Ken Chen, Adam Mansbach, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Oliver Wang, Davey D, Brian Cross, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, and Gary Delgado. All the failures of the text are entirely my own.

To Stephen Morrison, who saw a book in all of this, Monique Patterson, who helped me find a new voice in the decade after
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
, and the entire Picador/Macmillan fam, including Declan Taintor, James Meader, Henry Sene Yee, Kolt Beringer, Shannon Donnelly, Alex Sehulster, and especially Anna deVries, who pushed me further than I thought I could go with humor, brilliance, and grace. Thanks also to Henry Kaufman and Joel Breuklander for all your work.

To Victoria Sanders, Bernadette Baker-Baughman, and the entire crew at VSA for everything always.

An endless food-and-drink tab for my home team: Cody Laux, Lan Anh Le, Debra Pacio, and Alexis Wood for research and media; Hassan Rahim and Jon-Kyle Mohr for the websites; Stephen Serrato for the design wisdom; and Gabrielle Zucker for MVP awesomeness.

To my family, as long as I have breath, it is keyed to the rhythm of you.

~J

Berkeley, CA

May 2016

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Who We Be: The Colorization of America

(
Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post–Civil Rights America)

Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop
(editor)

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
EFF
C
HANG
is the author of
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
and
Who We Be: The Colorization of America
(published in paperback as
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. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

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WE GON’ BE ALRIGHT
. Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Chang. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Cover art courtesy of Damon Davis, from the “All Hands On Deck” poster series. 2015.
allhandsondeckproject.org

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to republish lyrics from “I Can’t Breathe” by Luke Nephew of the Peace Poets.

Visit Jeff Chang online at:
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bealright.net
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twitter.com/zentronix
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-312-42948-5 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978-1-250-11479-2 (e-book)

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First Edition: September 2016

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction:
The Crisis Cycle

Is Diversity for White People?
On Fearmongering, Picture Taking, and Avoidance

What a Time to Be Alive:
On Student Protest

The Odds:
On Cultural Equity

Vanilla Cities and Their Chocolate Suburbs:
On Resegregation

Hands Up:
On Ferguson

The In-Betweens:
On Asian Americanness

Conclusion:
Making Lemonade

Notes

Acknowledgments

Also by the Author

About the Author

Copyright