Jeff Chang

Jeff Chang is a new sage thinker with his finger on the pulse of American culture. His first book, the critically-acclaimed Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, collected a cornucopia of honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian-American Literary Award.

Next, he edited Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, an anthology of essays and interviews. Here, he talks about his latest opus, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, which has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction category.

Don’t let yourself be dissuaded by the grammatically-incorrect title, or it’s Ebonics chapter headings like “I Am I Be” and “What You Got to Say?” for the actual text isn’t written in inscrutable slang as implied, but rather makes a most articulate analysis of the evolution of American society from the March on Washington to the present. Read our Jan 2015 Interview with Jeff Chang