Quotes from Jeff Chang

Diversity allows whites to remove themselves while requiring the Other to continue performing for them.

The word 'citizen' confers rights, rights that are invisible, that really appear only when they are denied... You live in a racial state that formally denies difference, but in practice avows it, through the barrel of a gun or the conferring of papers.

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.

And so diversity remains a premonition of racial apocalypse; a photo op and dash; a commodity conveying value; a marker of moral credibility, even fitness in the Darwinian sense; a term of corporate management; an offering of racial innocence and absolution; a refusal of protection to historically negated communities of color; a performance for entertainment or edification or exploitation; another boring lesson in tolerance and civility; a mark of Otherness.

Resegregation grows not from white ignorance, but from white refusal and denial. And so half a century after the perk of the civil rights movement, the nation has moved again into crisis.

The truth would be difficult to speak, but it would be necessary to begin to right the wrongs done to Blacks and Coloureds. Reconciliation would not be a gift, but an 'exchange for truth.' In other words, peace and justice are inseparable from each other.

If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.

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

Generations are fictions.

Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.

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?

Segregation is still linked to racial disparities of every kind. Where you live plays a significant role in the quality of food and the quality of education available to you, your ability to get a job, buy a home, and build wealth, the kind of health care you receive and how long you live, and whether you will have anything to pass on to the next generation.

A book or a work of art--culture--cannot by itself change the world, but by asking questions that matter, it might attempt to be an act of articulation against violence, the brutal and the casual kinds. It might aspire to starting a conversation through which together we might find common meaning, and words that free.

What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege - while the battle rages all around - to disengage.

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.

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

Public Enemy's theme was Black collectivity, the one thing that had been lost in the post–Civil Rights bourgeois individualist goldrush. Over the years, rap groups had shrunk down to duos, but Public Enemy brought the crew back.

Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility.

Resegregation matters because it pulls communities and regions downward, and because it impacts us not just right now, but the life chances of those not yet born.

Style would make you friends, inspire loyalty and devotion, spawn a hundred imitators. It would make you enemies, unleash jealousy and fear, bring down the brute force of authority. The one thing style would never leave you was neutral. As King KASE 2 would say in the movie Style Wars, "When they see you got a vicious style, they wanna get loose about it. And that's what keeps it going.

Migration is always a choice to live. The opposite of migration is not citizenship. It is containment, the condition of being unfree shared with all who are considered less than citizens. The migrant reminds the citizen of the rights that they should be guaranteed.

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

Formalism was a language made for and by elites, a way through which art history would be recorded. It never aspired to be a way through which the masses might encounter and enjoy art.

By itself, gentrification can't explain the new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium... Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.