NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 54th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 18 July 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
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It’s been my pleasure to know Jeff Chang and follow his work for going on a couple of decades. I wish I could say we invited him on this podcast to celebrate his forthcoming book, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America (he does talk about it near the end of the episode, so stay tuned). But as happens all too often these days, the occasion is not celebration, but the censorship of one of his most loved books by the Department of Defense, headed by Fox television host/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Let’s let Jeff say a little about himself, and then I’ll share the story.
Jeff lives in Berkeley. He grew up in Honolulu. “I was born of Chinese and Kanaka Maoli, Kanaka Oiwi, Native Hawaiian descent. My family on the Chinese side goes back seven generations, and the Native Hawaiian side goes back for millennia. So we’ve been in the islands for a really long time.”
Describing his work and how he came to it, Jeff said, “I’m a writer and a cultural organizer. I’ve been working a lot at the intersection of art and culture and social change, which is, of course, how we got to be close friends. I’ve been following in your footsteps, Arlene, all these years. [That’s mutual, dear readers.] Bringing the ideas of narrative strategy and cultural strategy to a new generation, to new practitioners, has been a little bit of my remit, but mostly I’ve been a writer. I’ve been back to writing over the last few years full time. I was doing a lot of work in cultural justice, and I remain the Board Chair of the Center for Cultural Power, but mainly I’m a writer. I think of myself as a storyteller.
“I wrote a book called Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation that came out 20 years ago this year. That came from a childhood of growing up on an island and discovering the world through first AM radio and then FM radio, listening to freeform radio and hearing reggae for the first time. I found the world through through music, a lot about land and resistance and a lot of embedded pre-colonial and anti-colonial wisdom in it. Throughout growing up, music became my window onto the world, particularly Black freedom music in the form of soul and funk and disco and everything that preceded hip-hop.
“When hip-hop came out, that was the sound of us. It was a time in the island’s history where we were transitioning from this land resistance movement, this local base resistance, to a lot of development, and we were losing the battle. There were massive infusions of development monies, development capital coming in from Japan and from the mainland US. I saw these buildings started going up and and I heard hip-hop when I was in my tweens for the first time. It was a sound of kids who had grown up in an urban environment, kids of color who had been abandoned.
“There was this connection that me and a lot of my peers had to hip-hop. Seeing all these buildings going up, I got mad. I was mad at concrete. I was just angry. Seeing these kids creating a visual art, tagging the walls, and that was everything we wanted to do. So hip-hop gave me my voice, and a lot of other folks in my generation, our voices. There’s a line in this folk-rock song, Waimanolo Blues, “The beaches they sell to build their hotels.” We’re the next generation after that. And so hip-hop became our sound. That made me want to write about it when I got a lot older. And that’s the long story of how I got to writing Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop in 2005 .
That book turned out to be incredibly influential, shining a light on a new generation’s cultural resistance. Jeff set the context:
“I came of age in the Bay Area, with a lot of folks who are veterans of the radical and revolutionary sixties. We would feel the weight of the history on us: the Black Panther Party and the Third World Liberation Front, the rise of Ethnic Studies, the birth of multicultural literature with Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Ntozake Shange, all these folks coming out of the Bay Area. And then us. What are you all doing? You guys have this hip-hop thing. It’s kind of reactionary, it’s kind of misogynistic. We’re trying to tell folks, look, we grew up during a different time. You need to give us a little bit of a break here. Your revolution never came through, and we’re living in the aftermath of it. So the book maybe originated with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. But it was really a broader thing. It was partially about how culture was going to lead to social change, to political change.
“In the sixties, there was this idea that there was a political movement and there was a cultural movement, and rarely, if ever, should the twain meet. Cultural nationalist versus revolutionary nationalists, and that’s how it came down to to us. Politics, that was the hard work, like culture was the soft work. We’d grown up in a time in which politics was actually in retreat. We only saw rollbacks, this ongoing reactionary movement clawing back all the victories of the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, LGBT movement. So we resorted to culture as a way for us to be able to continue to advance these ideas and to move forward. It was in large part the story of culture’s place in making change, and the other part of it for my peers was to be able to say, ‘Yo, we’ve developed this beautiful thing. This is our claim on the world: hip-hop. There’s a deeper story to it.'”
Fast forward twenty years, and Jeff and Davey D Cook collaborated on a young adult version of the book, entitled Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Young Adult Edition.
“The idea was to connect this entire arc from Black Power through the rise of hip-hop into the rise of Black Lives Matter,” Jeff explained. “It came out in 2021, right in the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and in the depths of the pandemic in which all of this violence was being waged against Asian Americans. The two of us had a lot that we wanted to say. We had to talk about how in the intervening 20 years, hip-hop had become a global force. We had to revise the book to amend the serious, egregious omission of a lot of women in hip-hop. We had to talk about the shift to the rise of queer voices in hip-hop as well, an amazing change that had occurred with the rise of new generation artists. The books has been adopted in a lot of schools across the country and around the world. It found its audience immediately. There was a generation of us who have become teachers, so we’re picking it up. Libraries were picking it up because kids are coming in and asking for it and it helped to explain their world.”
Jeff’s response in the episode to Francois’ question about the changes they made for the new version and why they made them is really interesting. Be sure to listen all the way through.
A few years later, Trump was elected, and the censorship began. “One of the first things he does is put out a set of executive orders that are directly going after what he calls wokeness. There were three orders in particular directed at those who transmit knowledge. One was banning ‘gender ideology,’ which I still have no idea what that is, but I but I think what they mean is the restoration of sort of cis heterosexist norms and ideas about gender, what a woman’s role is and what a male’s role is. The second was supposedly to restore unity within the armed forces, allowing him to purge armed forces leadership that were women, that were folks of color, and to undo the changes that had come through the military since the draft was restarted in the 1960s. We saw the US armed forces becoming much, much more representative of the US and the future demographics of the US than any other institution. What it was really about doing was to restore white power, white supremacy within the armed forces. The third one was ending radical indoctrination at schools. This was wide-ranging, about hiring practices, undoing affirmative action and desegregation consent orders, undoing all of these classroom changes, how gender is taught now, how race and culture and history are taught, everything from slavery to the incarceration of Japanese Americans to the disenfranchisement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples to colonialism, imperialism, and militarism. These three executive orders have now given them a broad remit to be able to actually challenge and undo a lot of the advances of the last 50″plus years.
“The way that it came down to us was Pete Hegseth, because he now runs the Department of Defense, is now also the superintendent of one of the largest school districts in the country: all of the US schools on military bases, on American soil and all around the world, 67,000 students. Only 40% of the students are white. Hegseth said, go and pull all the books from the libraries and from your classrooms, and pull all the curricular materials that might fall afoul of these three executive orders. Nearly 600 books were pulled immediately from libraries and classrooms in these schools around the world. Posters of Martin Luther King, Jr and Malala were removed from the classrooms. There’s a section in the AP Psychology exam on gender, so they pulled all the AP Psychology prep curriculum that was on that section, and on and on and on.
“They began doing that in February and and students felt it immediately, and got pissed off. On April 10, there was a massive walkout in military schools, thousands of students walked out from Okinawa to Kentucky. Because of that, the ACLU was approached by 12 students to file a lawsuit to stop the banning of books and the banning of the curriculum and to undo these orders. We still don’t have a list of all the books that were banned, but the ACLU and the parents and students, mainly the students, have been able to cobble together a list of about 200 books, and they include things like To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, the classic book burning book that book burners love to burn, Handmaid’s Tale, Queer History of the United States, the Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Asian American histories of the United States, right? This is right in line with what they’re trying to do with the National Park Service, where they’re going to national sites like Manzanar, the Japanese American prison camp, and having all of the plaques removed that describe what happened there.
No one knows what happened to the actual books. Are they awaiting a bonfire?
This is a really rich episode, leading to a deep discussion of what MAGA is trying to accomplish with respect to culture. We hope you get as much out of the conversation as we did. We know you won’t want to miss it.
“Waimanalo Blues” performed by Henry Kapono, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, Cyril Pahinui, and Roland Cazimero. You can watch this version on YouTube, but it can’t be seen on other sites. Here’s a different one by Kawika Kahiapo: