Lavin speaker and award-winning hip-hop historian Jeff Chang talked to The Nation recently about race and Jeremy Lin. Chang is currently finishing his second book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America. From The Nation:

“It hasn’t just been a big couple of weeks for Jeremy; it has been for all of us who have been talking about how Asian-Americans are racialized. In two weeks, the discourse on Asian-Americans in general and Asian-American men in particular has moved up from the college campus level to the highest levels of the media. Issues that we’ve been talking about for years are now on the minds of the entire world. That has blown me away.”

…

“Part of me is over all the chatter about what Jeremy means, but the other part of me realizes that we’ve just turned a page in the way Asian-Americans are represented in the United States.”