“His issues are our issues: this changing America, this complicated, polyglot future that some are already living in, while some are fighting to tear apart.” Novelist Daniel Alarcón
For Jeff Chang, the need to address racial violence in America is an urgent necessity. In We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, the author of the seminal history of hip-hop, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, and Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America, delivers a poignant plea, an invocation for hope, and a thoughtful reflection on how activists and social media have emerged as the greatest catalysts for protest and, ultimately, change. USC’s Josh Kun, co-editor of Black and Brown Los Angeles, joins him for a conversation.
Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for more than a decade and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin, and Mother Jones. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, senior editor at Russell Simmons’s 360hiphop.com, and cofounder of the influential hip-hip label SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California.
Josh Kun is professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he is director of the Popular Music Project of the Norman Lear Center. He is an author and editor of several books, including Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, and Songs in the Key of Los Angeles.
This program is presented in partnership with Scripps 360: The First Year Experience at Scripps College.
Ticket reservations are required.