Jeff Chang Quotes & Sayings

But even more important, I think hip-hop has bridged the culture gap. It brings white kids together with Black kids, brown kids with yellow kids. They all have something in common that they love. It gets past the stereotypes and people hating each other because of those stereotypes. People — Jeff Chang

Generations are fictions. — Jeff Chang

Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak. — Jeff Chang

Racism is not merely about individual chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry. Ruth Glimore reminds us that it is about the ways different groups are 'vulnerable to premature death,' whether at the hands of the state or structures that kill. — Jeff Chang

The future of desegregation was not just about reaching mere numerical diversity. It was about fostering radical diversity, the wild protean sort. It was about what might flower when people could really meet across the lines. The cover of the fifth volume of the Yardbird Reader, rendered in day-bright Oakland A's yellow and green, featured the collective caught as they laughed at someone's wisecrack. They looked simultaneously hip and welcoming. In this colorized vision of American renewal, everyone could share in the joy. — Jeff Chang

Culture, like food, is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture in inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each other in our full humanity. It is to say that the culture does not paint a more just society. — Jeff Chang

But racism and inequality would never end if Blacks focused on easing white anxiety. — Jeff Chang

A turn in fortune should move us toward empathy and solidarity....But we live in a time when merchants of division draw us away from mutuality and toward the undoing of democracy itself. — Jeff Chang

For Trump diehards in a time of danger and disjunction, the media's job was not to challenge, but to affirm. So when demonstrators poured not the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, the media was supposed to confirm for them that those chaos makers were actually supporting the killing of cops, that somehow the Movement for Black Lives was a Black version of the Ku Klux Klan. And some pundits - Hannity, the same O'Reilly who confronted Trump - dutifully filled this role. In their telling, 'Black Lives Matter' was not a call to end state violence against Blacks-and in that way, to end state violence against all-it was evidence of hatred against whites, a premonition of racial apocalypse. — Jeff Chang

Millions wanted to see shows written, directed, and acted by people of colour telling stories about themselves. Duh. — Jeff Chang

People of color are allowed, even required to perform, and, especially these days on issues of race, to edify as well.
'Here you are, now entertain us'.
But are we allowed to lead? — Jeff Chang