Jeff Chang
Author, Journalist and Hip-Hop Historian
“What I hope to show is how inequality and segregation impact us all. Our destinies are interconnected, but not all of us have the best vantage point to see our way out of the fog of the culture wars. Some of us still can’t even see each other fully. But those who suffer the most have the most to teach the entire nation about how to move away from it all, if we choose to listen and act. What today’s activists, organizers, and artists are giving us is a range of new ways to see our past and our present. Even more, they are giving us the directive to address inequality and inequity now—to make it clear that if we do not do so, we will continue to be drawn back into the bad cycle, just as we were after 1965, and after 1992. Right now we have the opportunity to get it right. Our shared future
depends on it.”
Biography
Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. His 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. He edited Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, and his Who We Be: The Colorization of America (St. Martin's Press) was released in 2014 and re-published in paperback in 2016 under the title Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America (Picador), winning the Ray + Pat Browne Award for Best Work in Popular Culture and American Culture. We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (Picador), was published in 2016 and named the Northern California Nonfiction Book of the Year. In 2019, Chang and director Bao Nguyen created a four-episode digital series adaptation for PBS. His next project is a biography of Bruce Lee (Little, Brown).
Chang has written for The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, and many others. Born and raised in Honolulu, he is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UCLA. He serves as the Vice President of Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward. He was formerly the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. Chang has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and 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 list of 100 people “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.”
Photo Credits
Randy "Kel1st" Rodriguez