Buying Options

Print List Price:	$20.00
Kindle Price:	$12.99 Save $7.01 (35%)
Sold by:	Macmillan Price set by seller.

Promotions apply when you purchase

Deliver to your Kindle Library

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America by [Jeff Chang]

Follow the Author

Jeff Chang

Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America Kindle Edition

by Jeff Chang (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

44 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$12.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$12.75

$10.30

$1.59

Paperback

"Please retry"

$20.00

$12.99

$2.43

Kindle
$12.99 Read with Our Free App
Hardcover
$12.75

79 Used from $1.59 13 New from $10.30
Paperback
$20.00

42 Used from $2.43 15 New from $12.99

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.

Print length

417 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

St. Martin's Press
Publication date

October 21, 2014
File size

10697 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

Jeff Chang
147
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Jeff Chang
40
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $10.99
Jeff Chang
22
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $12.99

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Who We Be confirms the singular brilliance of Jeff Chang...Here is the story of us, from the bottom up, the top down, and side-to-side - an astoundingly astute collage of forgotten battles brought to light and watershed events made new by Chang's analysis. Who We Be is essential reading - not this season or this year, but until the audacity of post-racism kicks in. Which won't be happening anytime soon.” ―Adam Mansbach, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Rage is Back and Go the F*ck to Sleep

“With Who We Be Jeff Chang has emerged as a premier chronicler of the broad and unruly narrative of American culture. His characteristically deft prose, broad perspective and incisive observations make this is an essential chronicle of the past three decades of American cultural history. Who We Be is a brilliant brief on who we've been all along.” ―Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress; Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut

“Jeff Chang writes with necessary fire about the things that matter. Who We Be is a compassionate, clear-eyed book, an exciting contribution to the history of our present moment. I know of no better account of the glories and sorrows of contemporary American diversity, nor any so attuned to the outsized role that art has played in that journey.” ―Teju Cole, author of Open City

“In 2005, Jeff Chang wrote the Hip Hop book none of us saw coming, but all
of us wished we'd written. Many of us spent a decade trying to catch up. Who We Be smashes assumptions of postracialism and multiculturalism into hundreds of prickly pieces...(It) cradles the personal, communal, institutional and structural while ultimately showing us how to rebuild each with a bit more honesty and integrity. This is the book we've been waiting for.” ―Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

“A new book by Jeff Chang is always a cause for celebration. His voice is unique, and his issues are our issues: this changing America, this complicated, polyglot future that some are already living in, while some are fighting to tear apart. Who We Be is an important, timely book, and it's also a terrific read.” ―Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

New York Times Editor's Choice
Ray & Pat Browne Award For Best Work In Popular Culture and American Culture
NAACP Image Award Finalist
Books For A Better Life Award Finalist
Northern California Book Award Finalist

--This text refers to the library edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00IQOJDKK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press (October 21, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 21, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 10697 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 417 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #648,040 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #154 in Minority Studies
- #428 in 21st Century History of the U.S.
- #739 in Discrimination & Racism Studies

Customer Reviews:
44 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Jeff Chang

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

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. 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).

His latest book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation (Picador), was published in September 2016. His next project is a biography of Bruce Lee (Little, Brown).

Jeff has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. 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 as one of its 2016 YBCA 100 list of those “shaping the future of American culture.” With H. Samy Alim, he was the 2014 winner of the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award at Stanford University.

Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines. He has written for The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, Foreign Policy, 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.

He serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.

Visit him at jeffchang.net or facebook.com/jeffchangwriter

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

44 global ratings

5 star		80%
4 star		14%
3 star		6%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Susan Starr

Buy It, Read It, Do Something Because You Did

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 20, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book was originally published with the title "Who We Be: the Colorization of America", which I mention because it is emblematic of the work and perhaps of the author, himself. The current title is both less provocative to white readers and much more informative. In keeping with the mission Professor Chang seems to have been given. When I worked with Jeff Chang at Applied Research Center in Oakland back at the turn of the century, we all knew Jeff would become someTHING shiny and noticed, but we could not be sure what kind of someONE he would choose to become. What he is, this book has told me among many other things, is an educator. What an unusual way to be an authentic activist, a true caller of the future into being.

Knowing nothing about music (or much else culturally speaking) post 1978 or so, Chang's first book on hiphop was ignored by me, but my 20-something nephews really dug it. This one I bought to read online because I know the author and am a race fanatic, so wanted to know what "The Colorization of America"/ "A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America" meant. Wow, did I find out! The parts I understood because I lived them he put in a context so much wider that an old adage came to mind: If the answer is too big for the question, change the question. Chang has a bordering-on-brilliant talent for connecting what we might never otherwise have seen as common questions because our answers have been too small.

In my 18 years of public school (not all white, but all well-funded by tax dollars), 18 months at Washington University (before dropping out to join either the revolution or the hippies, whichever seemed more fun when I hitchhiked to San Francisco with a draft dodger in 1968), and three years of seminary (I am an ordained minister), I have met exactly two other people I would call "educator" as an identity rather than vocation or work title. Chang brings even an old, culturally ignorant and irrrelevant white lady like me into his stories. Stories he is telling us so that we can know we are not so very unlike, so very unlikely to do the right thing by one another.

His description of how the Obama/HOPE imagery came to be and morphed in startling ways follows a trajectory that has become familiar by that point in the text. Chang starts at the beginning of a tale only he can predict, and unless the reader is clued in to the esoterica of the topic (an astounding amount of research is evident in this book), s/he is in for a fascinating trip to a destination that, once it is glimpsed, makes sense of all that has been written before. Chang's cadences and fluid transitions from culturespeak to academic prose are a pleasure in and of themselves for any reader. And what a fine way of fleshing out for us the wisdom that "the personal is political" -- to hang most of what he tells us on the skeleton of one life. That way,it is possible for us to see ourselves as individual actors in history/herstory/ourstory. None of us is bigger than our cultural context, and none of us is exempt from the human imperative to act for the wellbeing of that culture. We be, at bottom, WE.

So, of course, read the book. Unless you receive public assistance, please BUY the book (this is how writers keep writing, yes?). Then try to articulate, if only to yourself, what difference what you just learned will make. Because that's how you'll know you've been educated, not just instructed.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Huma Rojo

Interesting, but...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 30, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is an interesting book, an artifact from the Age of Obama that reads perhaps somewhat differently in the current post-Obama era. This work promises to be a cultural history, but is in fact only (for the most part) a narrowly circumscribed media history (mostly of the visual arts and televisual media). Its methodology seems to be the deployment of the anecdote as metaphor for larger (other?) socio-cultural crises and conundrums. Some of these anecdotes are often fascinating, however, many of the anecdotes also read like "inside baseball" of cultural marginalia, which gives the text a very au courant academic feel (i.e., esoteric and opaque).

Unfortunately, the text lacks a singular thread or reasserted thematic that can bring together the dozens of stories about artists, activists, actors, and others across this veritable cast of thousands, which leaves the reader bereft of the larger meaning and import of the very subject of study, not to mention overwhelmed with minutiae. The epilogue is indicative of this fugue-like meandering across genres, topics, and personae, and left me wondering if Chang actually had an editor at Picador. It was like the magic had all gone by the last few pages, and the last, exhausted anecdotes reflected this. It makes me wonder how the text would be configured for the current American Horror Story. There is a kind of teleological certainty to cultural studies that emanate from the Obama era that seems very naive now. I would recommend this book for those interested in the visual arts, especially the ins and outs of the doyennes of the New York arts scene, and to a lesser extent music, comics, and television. The text certainly fills a niche, but simultaneously also feels very niche.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

E. A. Stowers

A work which could begin the healing of America

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 10, 2015

Verified Purchase

When Jeff Chang was interviewed by Marc Lamont Hill on C-Span/Book TV, which was fascinating, I could not wait to purchase the book. How We Be: The Colorization of America was not disappointing.
Little did I know how art, in all of its creative forms, fought against racial bigotry and influenced uprising against post slavery reconstruction, Jim Crow and contributed to what is now known as the Civil Rights era. Like so many other books on this and similar content have concluded, the issue of race has far from diminished over time. (Tamir, Eric, Michael, Trayvon, Jonathon, Sean, Anadou, etc. etc. etc.) The author, however, valiantly brings into the sunlight truths that the people of this country, white and black, have to find a way to resolve.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

July CHEN

good

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 24, 2020

good

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 8, 2015

Verified Purchase

This informative and comprehensive book serves as an introduction to the issues of the so-called "post-racial" generation. You come away with an understanding of this oxymoronic term.

One person found this helpful

Helpful