Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America

by Jeff Chang

Overview

New York Times Editor’s Choice

Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Work in Popular Culture and American Culture

NAACP Image Award Finalist

Books for a Better Life Award Finalist

Northern California Book Award Finalist

Over the past half-century, the U.S. has seen profound demographic and cultural change. But racial progress still seems distant. After the faith of the civil rights movement, the fervor of multiculturalism, and even the brief euphoria of a “post-racial” moment, we remain a nation divided. Resegregation is the norm. The culture wars flare as hot as ever. How do Americans see race now? Do we see each other any more clearly than before? In a powerful, original, and timely telling, Jeff Chang—the award-winning author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation—looks anew at the tumultuous half-century from the peak of the civil rights era to the colorization and strife of the Obama years. He uncovers a hidden history of American arts, cultural, and social movements that have changed the ways we see each other. Who We Be is at once beautiful and shocking, disquieting and hopeful, even as it urges us to reconsider the yet-unanswered question of how we might all get along.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250074898
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for more than a decade and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin, and Mother Jones. He is the author of several books, including the American Book Award-winning Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, senior editor at Russell Simmons’s 360hiphop.com, and cofounder of the influential hip-hip label SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Seeing America

Part 1: A New Culture, 1963-1979

Chapter 1 Rainbow Power: Morrie Turner and the Kids

Chapter 2 After Jericho: The Struggle against Invisibility

Chapter 3 "The Real Thing": Lifestyling and Its Discontents

Chapter 4 Every Man an Artist, Every Artist a Priest: The Invention of

Multiculturalism

Chapter 5 Color Theory: Race Trouble in the Avant-Garde

Part 2: Who Are We? 1980-1993

Chapter 6 The End of the World as We Know It: Whiteness, the Rainbow, and the Culture Wars

Chapter 7 Unity and Reconciliation: The Era of Identity

Chapter 8 Imagine/Ever Wanting/To Be: The Fall of Multiculturalism

Chapter 9 All the Colors in the World: The Mainstreaming of Multiculturalism

Chapter 10 We Are All Multiculturalists Now: Visions of One America

Part 3: The Colorization of America, 1993-2013

Chapter 11 Post Time: Identity in the New Millennium

Chapter 12 Demographobia: Racial Fears and Colorized Futures

Chapter 13 The Wave: The Hope of a New Cultural Majority

Chapter 14 Dis/Union: The Paradox of the Post-Racial Moment

Chapter 15 Who We Be: Debt, Community, and Colorization

Dreaming America

Editorial Reviews

Who We Be confirms the singular brilliance of Jeff Chang...Here is the story of us, from the bottom up, the top down, and side-to-side - an astoundingly astute collage of forgotten battles brought to light and watershed events made new by Chang's analysis. Who We Be is essential reading - not this season or this year, but until the audacity of post-racism kicks in. Which won't be happening anytime soon.” —Adam Mansbach, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Rage is Back and Go the F*ck to Sleep

“With Who We Be Jeff Chang has emerged as a premier chronicler of the broad and unruly narrative of American culture. His characteristically deft prose, broad perspective and incisive observations make this is an essential chronicle of the past three decades of American cultural history. Who We Be is a brilliant brief on who we've been all along.” —Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress; Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut

“Jeff Chang writes with necessary fire about the things that matter. Who We Be is a compassionate, clear-eyed book, an exciting contribution to the history of our present moment. I know of no better account of the glories and sorrows of contemporary American diversity, nor any so attuned to the outsized role that art has played in that journey.” —Teju Cole, author of Open City

“In 2005, Jeff Chang wrote the Hip Hop book none of us saw coming, but all of us wished we'd written. Many of us spent a decade trying to catch up. Who We Be smashes assumptions of postracialism and multiculturalism into hundreds of prickly pieces...(It) cradles the personal, communal, institutional and structural while ultimately showing us how to rebuild each with a bit more honesty and integrity. This is the book we've been waiting for.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

“A new book by Jeff Chang is always a cause for celebration. His voice is unique, and his issues are our issues: this changing America, this complicated, polyglot future that some are already living in, while some are fighting to tear apart. Who We Be is an important, timely book, and it's also a terrific read.” —Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles

From the Publisher

With Who We Be Jeff Chang has emerged as a premier chronicler of the broad and unruly narrative of American culture. His characteristically deft prose, broad perspective and incisive observations make this is an essential chronicle of the past three decades of American cultural history. Who We Be is a brilliant brief on who we've been all along.

author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama Jelani Cobb

Who We Be confirms the singular brilliance of Jeff Chang...Here is the story of us, from the bottom up, the top down, and side-to-side - an astoundingly astute collage of forgotten battles brought to light and watershed events made new by Chang's analysis. Who We Be is essential reading - not this season or this year, but until the audacity of post-racism kicks in. Which won't be happening anytime soon.

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Rage is Ba Adam Mansbach

Who We Be is ambitious in its scope, an impressive gathering of a wide range of artists of color, with their creative interventions and politically charged war stories. Chang is an artful narrator, who uses biographical detail, personal texture and historical and political context to bring his stories to life.

The New York Times Book Review - Tricia Rose

2014-08-18
Sprawling examination of how American society has responded to multiculturalism and demographic diversity. Chang (Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, 2005), the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford, focuses on visual artists and political dreamers in narrating how once-marginalized communities responded to the civil rights movement and then to the white backlash promoted by Richard Nixon and Republican strategist Lee Atwater. Amid violence and generational strife, cultural happenings, such as the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s, and innovators like African-American cartoonist Morrie Turner fomented "a grand yearning, a mass becoming, an end to the monoculture, the true arrival of a post-segregated nation." Corporations quickly co-opted this outsider aesthetic, a process famously embodied in the early '70s by Coca-Cola. Chang discusses important yet forgotten nodes in the developing dichotomy of multiculturalism versus "culture war," as when conservatives began attacking the National Endowment for the Arts during the '80s: "Defunding public culture proved good Republican politics." Yet simultaneously, Jesse Jackson "incepted into the mainstream the prophetic images of the rainbow" in his attempts to make the Democratic Party more inclusive. The triumph of "political correctness" seemed evident in the fierce controversies over the Whitney Biennials of the '90s, while Benetton's successful "Colors" ad campaign and magazine showed that "capitalism had at long last embraced its future in identity and diversity." As the Clinton years approached their end, "everything and nothing was multicultural," contrasting with the triumphalism and xenophobia that followed 9/11. Chang ends with a jaundiced portrait of the "hope" accompanying Barack Obama's presidency, smothered by conservative resentment and a massive economic crisis. The author adeptly synthesizes other scholars' research and has an eye for precise details, though he also relies on a labored fusion of academic sociology and urban buzzwords—e.g., "In this era of fragmentation and unrest, it was time for [Coca-Cola]…to reassert some alpha swag." An intriguing attempt at cutting through the dissonance of a series of changing cultural milieus.

Kirkus Reviews