Who We Be: The Colorization of America by Jeff Chang (review)

Jeff Chang’s latest book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, is a timely overview of race relations in a post-civil rights landscape. Who are “we” as a nation? Are we integrated or still segregated? Does the multicultural turn in the United States reflect lasting change, or does our current obsession with diversity merely represent the latest incarnation of national branding? Chang’s work hedges its bets on the answers, but it poses these questions in provocative and compelling ways. The winner of an American Book Award for Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005) and Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, Chang is well positioned to take the nation’s racial temperature.

Organized around at times surprising flashpoints of racial history over the past fifty years, Who We Be centers on visual culture: high art, comics, advertising, and photography. While Chang’s nod to literature seems limited to profiles of Ishmael Reed and Jessica Hagedorn, the book’s relevance to literary scholars is clear: in the media-saturated twenty-first century, racialization is increasingly tied to visual forms. Intended for a general readership, particularly for a generation able to consume images like candy, Who We Be is accessible to undergraduates and offers a historically attentive if somewhat veiled framing of racial “progress.”

Chapters move from integration efforts to pride in multiculturalism and its “culture wars” backlash, Obama’s election and the putatively “post-racial” moment, and the financial crises that starkly unveiled racial inequity as economic inequity. Throughout the book, Chang cogently illuminates the role that racial difference performs in the imaginative life of the nation. In his view, these differences fuel both our most base impulses and how we imagine ourselves together. The book takes as axiomatic that visibility is a resource like any other and that taking control of one’s cultural representation is a political act. As Chang writes, “Race begins in the gap between appearance and the perception of difference” (304).

For Chang, African American, Asian American, Latina/o, and American Indian visual artists assume the role of agent provocateur. It is the artist who tells us “who we be.” The book begins not with scenes of racial violence—protest, incarceration, or deportation—but with the work of the late Morrie Turner, the African American author of the comic strip “Wee Pals.” A mainstay of my local paper in the 1970s, the Oakland Tribune, even then the strip struck me as a bit of a throwback. Chang, however, situates Turner’s career as a micro example of racial change, a cartoonist who broke the color barrier in his field and in his subject matter.

The 1993 Whitney Biennial becomes another watershed moment, the point at which the New York art world opened itself to racially provocative work. Details about the behind-the-scenes activities leading up to this controversial show are perhaps less intriguing than overviews of the show itself. For example, each gallery visitor was handed one of six museum tags designed by Daniel Joseph Martinez. The first five read: “I,” “can’t imagine,” “ever wanting,” “to be,” “white.” The sixth tag included the entire phrase. The showpiece of the exhibit was Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West.” The artists staged themselves as “natives” in order to play on voyeurism and expectations of primitivism. Yet some visitors took the spectacle at face value. “Strip away multiculturalism’s radicalism,” writes Chang, “and what was left were the imperial amusements and unseemly desires” (161). The book asks us to consider the ways in which racial difference is also a site of fetishistic pleasure.

At times, debates in the rarified world of high art do not always seem commensurate with material inequities surrounding race, which also serve as the book’s foundation. The Third World...