We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

Chang (Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation) sounds the alarm about the “unmistakable lurch back to resegregation” in several spheres since the late ’60s. Each chapter focuses on a different area: higher education practices and policies, campus life, funding for the arts, housing practices and policies, and the criminal justice system. Chang concludes with a challenge to the conventional narrow black/white dichotomy, examining how segregation affects Asian-Americans (“the in-betweens”). As Chang delineates present-day events, he is attentive to historical context; he is at his most provocative, thought-provoking, and informing when laying bare the economic and political structures beneath segregation practices, including the infusion of corporate executives into college management, financial inequities in arts funding, the racial transformation of housing, and the link between local budget revenues and law enforcement practices. His delineation of the “bad loop of history... crisis, reaction, backlash, complacency, crisis” in American race relations constitutes a timely appeal to end a pervasive silence over resegregation. Chang’s title is optimistic, but the content of his book is not. (Sept.)