Late in Jeff Chang’s third book, “We Gon’ Be Alright,” a collection of mostly low-energy essays that too frequently reads like a Current Events for Dummies textbook about resegregation, he writes of himself: “You are the Asian American face of hip-hop scholarship, or some such s— like that.”
“We Gon’ Be Alright” is structured in seven arbitrary sections that content themselves to narrate the recent past, ranging from the student protests at the University of Missouri and Yale to skirmishes over affirmative action to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.
In an essay titled “Vanilla Cities and Their Chocolate Suburbs,” Chang speaks of the black experience as one of categorical poverty and strife.
Yet Chang, who directs the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford, seems unaware of urban spaces in America — beyond the segregated Bay Area — where black communities are thriving, places as far away as Atlanta or Brooklyn, but also closer to home in parts of Los Angeles.
[...] he is silent about the complicated loyalties and realities of the kind of educated and upwardly mobile black professionals who are themselves displacing the poor all over Washington, D.C., and Harlem.
[...] if Chang, a Hawaiian of mixed-Asian ancestry with a penchant for ebonics, struggles to visualize 21st century black people in all of our fullness and contradiction, it is a symptom of a larger flaw of sensibility.
To borrow James Baldwin’s phrasing from “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” one gets the impression he can’t help but apply to whatever matter is at hand a relentless tsk-tsking that is “moral, neatly framed, and incontestable, like those improving mottoes found hanging on the walls of furnished rooms.”
Like Coates, though, he hits on his most engaging, expressive prose when using the second person to access his own life experiences and youthful identity crises before panning out to the broader complexity of Asian Americanness in general.
“You and your folks put Tabasco sauce in your saimin and ate your BBQ mix plate with chopsticks,” he writes with real feeling.
Sometimes you scroll through your Facebook page, and your Black or Chicano friends have posted a video or a quote or a news item of Black or Chicano folks doing something beautiful, ironic, or sad under the line ‘I love us.’
