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Every time you turn on the TV or grab a newspaper, it seems
as though another black life has been lost and “the list
never seems to cease,” says Chang. It’s a trend that’s
escalated to the point that it’s now “blown into white
America as well,” which should coalesce us but which
actually seems to divide us all the more. We seem, as Chang
says, to have “slid back toward segregation.”
The current political climate isn’t helping.
Over the past 12 months, whites who felt “undone” by wage
gaps and who had “fears of falling” flocked to a candidate
that understood how to gain their support by pointing
accusing fingers at Mexicans, the Chinese and Muslims. When
demonstrations were held to protest this, violence broke
out, which only fueled the fires.
Diversity, says Chang, has become a “buzzword.” Schools
strive for it but often do it wrong. Hollywood is still
“overwhelmingly white,” as are the C-Suites of most major
corporations. Colleges struggle with issues of affirmative
action, while black students make the same demands of their
administrations that they’ve been making “for three
decades now.”
And then there’s housing.
Chang uses San Francisco as an example: as the tech industry
grows, formerly-black neighborhoods with affordable rents
have been taken over by new, elite, mostly-white residents.
Overall, “cities are becoming wealthier and whiter,” they’re
becoming divided largely by income, and housing projects are
being torn down, bringing us full-circle back to
resegregation.
“The revolution is never complete,” Chang says. “But
redemption is out there for us if we are always in the
process of finding love and grace.”
So what can be done?
I didn’t think author Jeff Chang had many concrete
solutions here, but in We Gon’ Be Alright, he
offers an ocean of hope.
In the meantime – long before you get to that – Chang’s
provocative essays are wide and quite discouraging. Here, he
writes of all that’s wrong in an effort to show how we might
feel like we’ve made occasional progress but that nothing’s
really changed. Through resegregation, our “progress” is
just a problem, rearranged. Most assuredly, that doesn’t
make this an eager read.
And yet, there’s grace inside Chang’s observations – grace,
which is exactly what he advocates in the end, in a stunning
chapter that brings this whole book to a pinnacle.
I wondered if perhaps this book is pocket-sized on purpose:
it seems like something you might want to tuck away close
and consume in short bursts, in order to ponder. With We
Gon’ Be Alright, that kind of reading might be better.
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