Jeff Chang > Quotes

“Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.”
― Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.”
― Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“White supremacy is a motherfucker.”
― Jeff Chang

“Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Public Enemy’s theme was Black collectivity, the one thing that had been lost in the post–Civil Rights bourgeois individualist goldrush. Over the years, rap groups had shrunk down to duos, but Public Enemy brought the crew back.”
― Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“Generations are fictions.”
― Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Culture, like food, is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture in inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each other in our full humanity. It is to say that the culture does not paint a more just society.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege - while the battle rages all around - to disengage.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“But racism and inequality would never end if Blacks focused on easing white anxiety.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Segregation is still linked to racial disparities of every kind. Where you live plays a significant role in the quality of food and the quality of education available to you, your ability to get a job, buy a home, and build wealth, the kind of health care you receive and how long you live, and whether you will have anything to pass on to the next generation.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“A book or a work of art--culture--cannot by itself change the world, but by asking questions that matter, it might attempt to be an act of articulation against violence, the brutal and the casual kinds. It might aspire to starting a conversation through which together we might find common meaning, and words that free.”
― Jeff Chang, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America

“For Trump diehards in a time of danger and disjunction, the media's job was not to challenge, but to affirm. So when demonstrators poured not the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, the media was supposed to confirm for them that those chaos makers were actually supporting the killing of cops, that somehow the Movement for Black Lives was a Black version of the Ku Klux Klan. And some pundits - Hannity, the same O'Reilly who confronted Trump - dutifully filled this role. In their telling, 'Black Lives Matter' was not a call to end state violence against Blacks-and in that way, to end state violence against all-it was evidence of hatred against whites, a premonition of racial apocalypse.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“People of color are allowed, even required to perform, and, especially these days on issues of race, to edify as well.
'Here you are, now entertain us'.
But are we allowed to lead?”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Migration is always a choice to live. The opposite of migration is not citizenship. It is containment, the condition of being unfree shared with all who are considered less than citizens. The migrant reminds the citizen of the rights that they should be guaranteed.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“The horizon toward which we move always recedes before us. The revolution is never complete. What we see now as solid and eternal may be disintegrating inward from our blind spots. All that signifies progress may in time be turned against us. But redemption is out there for us if we are always in the process of finding love and grace.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Resegregation happens through design and through apathy. It also grows through our blindness - whether willed, imperceivable, or fixed through the best of our intentions - to the deep connections between us all. Silence over resegregation has led us to this historical moment. The young may not speak in the language we are accustomed to hearing. We may think them sometimes too imprecise or cavalier in their rage. But if we miss their point - for which they have been willing to sacrifice everything - we will undoubtedly be hearing it again from the next generation.”
― Jeff Chang

“Resegregation grows not from white ignorance, but from white refusal and denial. And so half a century after the perk of the civil rights movement, the nation has moved again into crisis.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Racism is not merely about individual chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry. Ruth Glimore reminds us that it is about the ways different groups are 'vulnerable to premature death,' whether at the hands of the state or structures that kill.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Formalism was a language made for and by elites, a way through which art history would be recorded. It never aspired to be a way through which the masses might encounter and enjoy art.”
― Jeff Chang, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America

“Finding grace is an individual process that changes the social. It is about seeing each other in the world and seeing one's own place in the world anew. In that way grace can counter the lies, refusals, and aggressions that drive us toward segregation. We live in serious times, in which we need to be roused to the inequity in our neighborhoods, our schools, our metro areas, our justice system, our culture. Ending resegregation is about understanding the ways we allow ourselves to stop seeing the humanity of others. It is about learning again to look, and never stopping.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Resegregation matters because it pulls communities and regions downward, and because it impacts us not just right now, but the life chances of those not yet born.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Later, many would debate whether [Michael Brown Jr.] actually had his hands up when he was shot. Some pundits asking if the movement had been built on a lie. But that debate missed the point: the image resonated--and would continue to grow in the public imagination--because it captured a bigger truth, a deeper feeling. 'Hands Up' was about the ways we saw race in post-civil rights America, and perhaps especially about what we refused to see--the blindness of a 'post-racial' era. If, as intellectual Ruth Gilmore had written, racism was about the ways in which Blacks, whites, and others differently experienced 'vulnerability to premature death,' 'Hands Up' was an argument for the right to live.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“In every generation, radicals nurture scorn for authority and the old. They tap into a desire to destroy convention and induce shock. They demand tribal commitment and discipline. They risk everything to bring the new into being.”
― Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A Hip-Hop History

“Youth movements are always fueled by a combustible mix of pain, defiance, imagination, inexperience, commitment, and risk. The most successful of them turn what look to elders like insurmountable liabilities into virtues. The most moral of them open up new ways to see how we can live better together.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“By itself, gentrification can't explain the new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium... Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Diversity allows whites to remove themselves while requiring the Other to continue performing for them.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“The word 'citizen' confers rights, rights that are invisible, that really appear only when they are denied... You live in a racial state that formally denies difference, but in practice avows it, through the barrel of a gun or the conferring of papers.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Black Lives Matter' articulated an impatience with the politics of respectability. Proponents of respectability politics, Randall Kennedy wrote, 'advocate taking care in presenting oneself publicly and desire strongly to avoid saying or doing anything that will reflect badly on Blacks, reinforce negative racial stereotypes, or needlessly alienate potential allies.' Such politics were resurgent during the Obama era. The president himself was both a source and symbol of respectability politics.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation