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We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race, Resegregation, and Public Art
January 30, 2020 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm PST
Jeff Chang gives a talk related to his latest book, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation. Published in 2016, it was named the Northern California Nonfiction Book of the Year, and the Washington Post declared it “the smartest book of the year.”
Jeff Chang is vice president for narrative, arts and culture at Race Forward. His books include Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, and Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post Civil Rights America. Cofounder of CultureStr/ke and ColorLines, Chang was named by The Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” and by KQED as an Asian Pacific American Local Hero. He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and the winner of the Asian American Literary Award. He was recently named to the Frederick Douglass 200.
For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu.
Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music.
His first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, garnered many honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Slate named it one of the best nonfiction books of the past 25 years. He edited the book, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop.
Who We Be: The Colorization of America (St. Martin’s Press) was released on October 2014, to critical acclaim. It was published in paperback in January 2016 under the new title, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post Civil Rights America (Picador). The book won the Ray + Pat Browne Award for Best Work in Popular Culture and American Culture and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Books For A Better Life Award.
His latest book, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation (Picador), was published in September 2016 on Picador. It was named the Northern California Nonfiction Book Of The Year, and the Washington Post declared it “the smartest book of the year.” In May 2019, he and director Bao Nguyen created a four-episode digital series adaptation of the book for PBS Indie Lens Storycast.
His next project is a biography of Bruce Lee (Little, Brown).
Jeff has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature. He was named by The Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” by KQED as an Asian Pacific American Local Hero, and by the Yerba Buena Center for The Arts to its 2016 YBCA 100 list of those “shaping the future of American culture.” He was recently named to the Frederick Douglass 200, as one of “200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.”
He has also been a winner of the North Star News Prize, and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Single Work in Popular Culture and American Culture. With H. Samy Alim, he received the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award at Stanford University.
Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines. He has written for The Guardian, Slate, the New York Times, The Nation, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, N+1, Mother Jones, Salon, and Buzzfeed, among many others.
Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i, he is a graduate of ‘Iolani School, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
For the past seven years he was the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. He serves as the Vice President for Narrative, Arts and Culture at Race Forward.
Arts + Design Thursdays @ BAMPFA is made possible thanks to support from the Big Ideas Courses Program in the College of Letters & Science at UC Berkeley and from generous supporters of Berkeley Arts + Design. In-kind support is provided by BAMPFA.