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Summary
Summary
Race. A four-letter word. The greatest social divide in American life, a half-century ago and today.
During that time, the U.S. has seen the most dramatic demographic and cultural shifts in its history, what can be called the colorization of America. But the same nation that elected its first Black president on a wave of hope--another four-letter word--is still plunged into endless culture wars.
How do Americans see race now? How has that changed--and not changed--over the half-century? After eras framed by words like "multicultural" and "post-racial," do we see each other any more clearly?
Who We Be remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests and corporate marketing campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trayvon Martin into a powerful, unusual, and timely cultural history of the idea of racial progress. In this follow-up to the award-winning classic Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation , Jeff Chang brings fresh energy, style, and sweep to the essential American story.
Author Notes
Jeff Chang's first book was the award-winning Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation . He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and was named by The Utne Reader one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.
Reviews (5)
Booklist Review
By 2042, there will be no majority race in the U.S. What will that mean? Cultural analyst Chang (Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, 2005) looks back on the complicated history of race in the U.S. and ahead at the demographic promise of a much more racially diverse nation. Chang notes that the nation has been colorizing for centuries, from slavery through desegregation and an uneasy, halfhearted integration. Drawing on media images and interviews, Chang chronicles ideas of race since the mid-1960s. He features cartoonists from Morrie Turner (Wee Pals) to Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks) and their personal journeys as they navigated a profession with few blacks and reflected on changing images of race. He also explores the branding of multiculturalism seen in ads for brands including Coca-Cola and Benetton. His larger focus is on how art, music, and commerce have reflected changes in attitudes and images of race, from minstrelsy to militancy to multiculturalism. In this engaging look at race and culture, Chang raises questions but admits there are no simple or easy answers as culture continues to evolve.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE DRAMATIC CHANGES spurred by the civil rights movement and other 1960s social upheavals are often chronicled as a time line of catalytic legal victories that ended anti-black segregation. Jeff Chang's "Who We Be: The Colorization of America" claims that cultural changes were equally important in transforming American society, and that both the legal and cultural forms of desegregation faced a sustained hostile response that continues today. According to Chang, the author of "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation," multiculturalism challenged who and what defined America, going straight to the heart of who "we" thought we were and who "we" aspired to be. Attacks on exclusions by multicultural scholars and artists were taking place everywhere. University battles raged over whether the Western literature canon should continue to be elevated, or imagined outside the politics of racial hierarchies. Artists confronted the nearly all-white and all-male elite art world. Chang even describes Coca-Cola's influential 1971 "I'd like to teach the world to sing" advertisement as a signal of how profitable a "harmonious" multicultural marketing plan could be. But over the next several decades, all the way through Obama's elections, powerful counterattacks were launched, increasingly in racially oblique language. "Both sides understood that battles over culture were high-stakes," Chang writes. "The struggle between restoration and transformation, retrenchment and change, began in culture." "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. He highlights important but unsung heroes like the 1960s trailblazer Morrie Turner, who struggled to break into newspapers with his playful but politically sharp multiracial "Wee Pals" comic strip. Chang's description of Turner's meeting with Aaron McGruder, the young hotshot creator of the syndicated strip "The Boondocks," conveys an entire fraught history of race through their careers. Turner and McGruder represent different historical moments, and yet so much seemed the same for each of them. There has been nothing comic about all the ways they and other nonwhite artists found themselves excluded, or forced into racial corners even as a few superstars were being individually elevated. Stories like these suggest that multiculturalism was not so much about demanding a seat at the existing table (although some seemed comfortable with that outcome). Instead, it was really about the tenacious drive of so many creative people of color to fundamentally change the cultures of whiteness that saturated art, education, marketing and communications. Nonetheless, Chang's myriad portraits beg for a stronger overarching narrative than he provides. While you are immersed in an ocean of multicultural stories, the details swim around you like schools of vivid fish. But after you come up for air, it is hard to hold on to everything you have just taken in. What, ultimately, do all these skirmishes about race, American culture and multiculturalism add up to? In fact, Chang's pages on artists working in the "postmulticultural moment" - the younger generation the curator Thelma Golden and the artist Glenn Ligon half-jokingly called "postblack" - hit on an unsettling possible future, one where collective anti-racist identities could disappear long before racial discrimination does. It seems that the political litmus tests that defined earlier generations of black, Hispanic and Asian artists, who necessarily relied on consolidated racial and ethnic identities to break down the walls of exclusion, are now often considered passé and perhaps somewhat embarrassing to a younger generation. Postmulticulturalists may bristle at the limitations of identity politics, but it is not clear that the hyperindividualist, market-friendly kind of postmulticulturalist creativity has actually freed anyone. And it could be that new kinds of limitations are developing. The demand to be recognized as a unique and individual multicultural artist fails to confront continuing racialized constraints and marginalizations, not only in the art world and mass media but also on the streets. Given the stakes, I would have enjoyed learning more about collective creative practices designed to retain a political multiculturalism, in contrast to the bevy of individual artistic visions Chang presents. Surely our national fabric is more racially diverse than ever before, and a few more people of color have access to powerful cultural institutions. At the same time, "Who We Be" left me wondering about the resilience of power. It is possible but not inevitable that multiculturalism will fuel the creation of an anti-racist and fully inclusive society. But it is also possible that we could become the kind of multiracial society that keeps its darker-skinned people at the bottom to provide cultural raw material to a powerful white elite that celebrates the diversity on which it depends. As "Who We Be" makes clear, there is evidence for both trajectories, though it does not take a stand on this tension. It leaves us in mid-battle with reasons to be both worried and hopeful. TRICIA ROSE is the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University and the author of "The Hip Hop Wars."
Choice Review
Historically, the US has been defined by whiteness. Stephen Douglas (1858) was famously paraphrased as saying, "this government of ours was founded on the white basis. It was founded by the white man for the benefit of the white man." This was popularized and simplified as "This is a white man's country." Yet massive demographic shifts since the 1960s and the rise of multiculturalism and the culture wars have given people of color new prominence. Chang (Stanford) calls the massive shifts that began taking place as the civil rights movement ebbed "colorization." Weaving together art history, politics, cartoons, and media, he suggests that American visual culture has been "colorized." Never in US history have so many nonwhite people been so visible in commercials, advertising, politics, or the media. But what good has it done? What difference has it made? Race continues to haunt the nation like a painful wound, a blind spot, marked by silence, denial, evasion, and amnesia. Whether one discusses Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, or the deportation of "illegal" immigrants, the agony of race persists. The war between the ethnocentric nation and the ideal of a universal nation continues. Great photos. A masterpiece. Required reading. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Wayne C. Glasker, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden
Kirkus Review
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 buzzwordse.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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Beginning with the 1960s and continuing until the fatal shooting of the African American teenager Trayvon Martin, this book examines advertising, comics, media, and fine arts as they relate to the politics of multiculturalism in America. Chang (executive director, Inst. for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford Univ.; Can't Stop Won't Stop) states that he does not mean to write the definitive work on the subject of multiculturalism, preferring to emphasize lesser-known artists and movements. Because the subject of the book is nebulous, the chapters can feel disconnected. One section discusses conservative political strategies while the next includes a biography of an obscure poet. However, engaging and fast-paced writing makes the volume worth reading, and the inclusion of Native American, Asian American, and Latino artists strengthens the theme. For a reader interested in the history of identity art, this work can bring up new names to research. VERDICT Recommended for those interested in race relations in America, as well as readers seeking background information on the author's previous works. Jessica Spears, Monroe Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: Seeing America | p. 1 |
| Part 1 A New Culture, 1963-1979 | |
| Chapter 1 Rainbow Power: Morrie Turner and the Kids | p. 17 |
| Chapter 2 After Jericho: The Struggle Against Invisibility | p. 38 |
| Chapter 3 "The Real Thing": Lifestyling and Its Discontents | p. 55 |
| Chapter 4 Every Man an Artist, Every Artist a Priest: The Invention of Multiculturalism | p. 67 |
| Chapter 5 Color Theory: Race Trouble in the Avant-Garde | p. 79 |
| 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 | p. 101 |
| Chapter 7 Unity and Reconciliation: The Era of Identity | p. 126 |
| Chapter 8 Imagine/Ever Wanting/to Be: The Fall of Multiculturalism | p. 143 |
| Chapter 9 All the Colors in the World: The Mainstreaming of Multiculturalism | p. 169 |
| Chapter 10 We Are All Multiculturalists Now: Visions of One America | p. 191 |
| Part 3 The Colorization of America, 1993-2013 | |
| Chapter 11 I Am I Be: Identity in Post Time | p. 213 |
| Chapter 12 Demographobia: Racial Fears and Colorized Futures | p. 241 |
| Chapter 13 The Wave: The Hope of a New Cultural Majority | p. 255 |
| Chapter 14 Dis/Union: The Paradox of the Post-Racial Moment | p. 273 |
| Chapter 15 Who We Be: Debt, Community, and Colorization | p. 291 |
| Epilogue: Dreaming America | p. 317 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 345 |
| Notes | p. 349 |
| Index | p. 391 |