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Event
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents: Jeff Chang / We Gon' Be Alright
"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, Define American
Jeff Chang's first book Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation became an instant classic when it was published in 2005 and received many honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Obsessively researched, beautifully written, Chang's book is the funky bootleg, B-side remix of the late 20th century American history (Time Magazine).
His second book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America (2014, St. Martin's Press, published in paperback by Picador earlier this year under the title Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America), was also critically acclaimed, selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice and as a finalist for several prestigious awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the NAACP Image Award.
Chang's efforts to enrich our cultural dialogue precede and transcend his books. He co-founded and ran the indie hip hop label SoleSides, now known as Quannum Projects, where he helped to launch the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, and Lateef the Truth Speaker. He was an organizer of the inaugural National Hip-Hop Political Convention, co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines, and serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. Chang was named by The Utne Reader one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" and in 2016, YBCA named him as one of its 100 list of those "shaping the future of American culture."
Most importantly, Chang is an erudite, passionate voice of reason, and it is inspiring to be in his presence. Please join us in celebrating his new book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation!
In these provocative essays he 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.
With elegant prose and remarkable scholarship, Jeff Chang's We Gon' Be Alright moves us into an illuminated landscape of penetrating facts and unavoidable truths. In these pages, one learns the devastating effects of re-segregation, 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. A real page-turner: read it and share 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 post-racial triumphalism. Diversity trumps equity, racial innocence trumps history, gentrification trumps re-segregation, 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
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, author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America
A compelling and intellectually thought-provoking exploration of the quagmire of race relations. -- Kirkus Reviews Starred Review
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LocationHillside Club, Berkeley, CA (View)
2286 Cedar St.
Berkeley, CA 94709
United States
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