A Different Mirror

Takaki opens Chapter 14 with a description of America’s entry into World War II after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The US government, unlike its treatment of German Americans and Italian Americans, singled out Japanese Americans as enemies of the state. In 1942 President Roosevelt authorized the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. To prove their patriotism, 33,000 Japanese Americans enlisted in the US Armed Forces. Despite their military accomplishments and sacrifices, Japanese Americans faced hostility and discrimination upon their return from the warfront.

In the remainder of the chapter, Takaki details the involvement of African Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Jewish Americans in World War II. In each case, they made significant contributions to the US war effort yet were marginalized from mainstream America. For instance, 900,000 African Americans enlisted in the US Armed Forces but were segregated from white regiments and usually assigned to service and support duties. Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans also enlisted in the army in large numbers to show their patriotism and to improve their standard of living. Takaki narrates the case of the Navajo to show the unique skill sets that minority groups brought to the military. The US military recruited the Navajo as code talkers to pass on messages that war enemies could not decipher. Cultural diversity, in this instance, was celebrated.

On the home front, too, ethnic minority groups contributed to the wartime effort. Initially, many defense industry jobs were reserved for whites. This changed as labor shortages grew and more opportunities became available to minority groups and women. African American and Mexican American women comprised a large portion of this labor force, with thousands working on the assembly lines as riveters. Mexicans also were central to the continuing of agricultural production through the bracero program, which allowed guest laborers to work in the United States and return to Mexico at the end of their contract. Nonetheless, while directly helping US war efforts, ethnic minority groups still encountered extreme forms of discrimination and violence, as evidenced by the large number of riots—242 in 47 cities—that occurred in 1943.

Takaki’s last example focuses on Jewish Americans’ experiences and involvement in World War II. The heading, “A Deafening Silence,” captures the general public sentiment toward Jews and the refusal to recognize the pogroms occurring in Europe during Hitler’s rise to power. A Gallup poll in 1938 showed that 77% of Americans opposed increasing the immigration quota to allow German Jews to settle in the United States. A bill for children refugees to enter the US also was rejected. President Roosevelt kept to his strategy of “rescue-through-victory” (378), even after newspapers began circulating accounts of Nazi atrocities in 1942. By 1945, when the war finally ended, 6 million Jews had been exterminated in what is now called the Holocaust.

Takaki concludes the chapter with a discussion of President Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force an unconditional surrender from the Japanese. Seventy thousand people died instantly, mostly women and children. The Japanese surrendered but with the stipulation to maintain the sovereignty of their emperor. This outcome likely would have occurred even if the atomic bombs were not deployed.

Chapter 15 examines the aftermath of World War II and describes the social, economic, and political changes that ethnic minority groups demanded for a more equal and democratic America. As Takaki writes, “During the war, millions of men and women of different racial and ethnic minorities had challenged America’s contradiction of the color lines, and in the process reinvented themselves” (383). In the early part of the chapter, Takaki focuses on these changes through the perspective of women and their demands for better professional and educational opportunities.

Takaki next turns his attention to US Supreme Court cases that struck down institutionalized racism as unconstitutional. This includes the 1954 landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared that segregated schools were “inherently unequal” (389). On paper the court’s ruling significantly advanced ideals of equality. In practice, white society refused to accept desegregation, especially in the South, which led social activists to go into these communities to demand meaningful change. Their social activism ushered in the Civil Rights Movement.

The rest of the chapter offers a survey of grassroot strategies to desegregate the South. Takaki covers the bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and 1963 March on Washington. In the struggle for freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a prominent leader who encouraged social activists to follow Christian teachings and Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics of nonviolence. During this time, African American activists formed coalitions with other political and ethnic groups, including whites, many of whom were Jewish. Takaki notes the deep history of Jewish involvement in struggles for black emancipation, linking their oppression to a wider struggle for equality.

Alliances with whites, however, had limits, especially as the Civil Rights Movement moved North and class divisions became more apparent. Takaki describes the tensions between African Americans and Jewish landlords and refers to the Harlem riot of 1964 when African Americans looted Jewish owned-stores. In 1966, following in the ideological traditions of black nationalists like Marcus Garvey and Stokely Carmichael, “young militant blacks issued a clarion call for Black Power” (395). This movement identified with the decolonization struggles of third-world countries: “Equality, for many black militants now meant self-determination for blacks as a colonized people in America. The cry of black nationalism was for separatism rather than integration, and there was no place for whites, including Jews, in the movement for black liberation” (395). Takaki associates this movement with the leadership of Malcolm X who, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., encouraged African Americans “to use violence to defend their rights” (397).

While the Civil Rights Movement made important social and political advancements, like desegregation and expanded voting rights for African Americans, it did not dismantle “the structural economic foundations of racial inequality” (396). In the concluding sections of the chapter, Takaki addresses the effects of deindustrialization, the rolling back of affirmative action legislation, and the gutting of social welfare programs in which military spending was prioritized over education, public health, and housing. Takaki covers these developments through the 1990s. As a case example, he describes the premise and aftermath of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, which occurred when a jury acquitted white police officers who assaulted Rodney King, an unarmed black motorist. In the ensuing protests, Korean American shops were destroyed, and the majority of looters arrested were Latino. The riots, as Takaki points out, were multiracial, thus showing the interdependency of ethnic groups.

Takaki closes the chapter by noting that the end of the Cold War opened possibilities for the government to redirect defense spending to other areas to revitalize the economy and improve the standard of living for Americans. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center eclipsed this possibility.

In Chapter 16 Takaki discusses two new refugee groups who, in the late 20th century, migrated to the United States to flee violence and persecution in their home countries. Takaki first describes the plight of South Vietnamese who supported the United States during the Vietnam War and suffered retaliation from communists after the war ended in 1975. Successive waves of immigration from Vietnam occurred in the decades that followed, and by 2000, nearly 1.4 million Vietnamese Americans were living in the US. Takaki’s second case study focuses on Afghan refugees who, similar to the Vietnamese, experienced war in their home country and encountered immense hardships during their journey to the United States. Like the Vietnamese, Afghan immigrants also found it difficult to adjust to American cultural norms. After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Afghan immigrants encountered extreme incidents of Islamophobia because of their Muslim religion.

Chapter 16 also addresses more recent waves of settlement in the United States by Jewish, Chinese, and Irish immigrants. At the end of the Cold War, anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union pushed half a million Jews to emigrate to the United States and Israel. For the Chinese, the chance to pursue a higher education compelled many students to emigrate to America. In 1965 Congress repudiated racist legislation that restricted Asian immigration, which made it possible for students to bring their families to settle permanently, a trend that continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A large number of Irish seeking better employment opportunities also emigrated to the US, with a significant portion staying after their visas expired. While “whiteness” helped Irish immigrants blend in more easily than other ethnic groups, their undocumented status made them targets for deportation. Recognizing commonalities with Mexican Americans, Irish immigrants joined in their struggles to advocate for immigration reform.

Takaki’s final case study discusses the marginalization of Mexican Americans and the intense xenophobia they faced in the United States. Opponents of Mexican immigration in the 1990s argued for increased border control and vilified Mexicans for “taking jobs away from American citizens,” but as Takaki notes, underneath this clamor was “a fear of the ‘Browning of America’” (426). He addresses the political and economic conditions that facilitated larger patterns of Mexican migration to the United States, like the North American Free Trade Agreement. Government subsidies to American farmers undercut the agricultural production of Mexican farmers, forcing them to seek employment in the US. Increased border patrol also made it dangerous for Mexicans to migrate between the two countries, causing many Mexicans to stay in the United States indefinitely.

While Mexicans remain vital to the American economy—working in agriculture, poultry processing plants, garment factories, and service and domestic industries for little pay—they are highly marginalized and maligned in American society. Fear of deportation prevents many undocumented Mexicans from seeking public assistance, and even though they pay taxes, they rarely benefit from these programs. Despite these obstacles, large numbers of Mexicans have claimed the United States as their home: “According to the 2006 US Census figures, 70 percent of California’s Mexican population are US citizens” (433). Takaki concludes the chapter with a number of stories that attest to Mexican Americans’ hard work and perseverance to improve their lives and those of their children.

Chapter 17 opens with a description of Takaki receiving a phone call from President Bill Clinton’s assistant in 1997. The president wanted Takaki to participate in a gathering with civil rights leaders and scholars to help write a speech entitled, “One America in the Twenty-First Century: The President’s Initiative on Race” (434). Takaki accepted the request and informed President Clinton that his speech was timely given that “sometime in the twenty-first century, whites will become a minority in the US population” (434). In other words, “we will all be minorities” (434).

In the speech Clinton addressed the contributions and sacrifices of minority groups in the United States. Americans once faced the choice of “becoming two Americas, one white, one black, separate but unequal” (435). The choice today is different. President Clinton questions,

Will we become not two, but many Americas, separate, unequal, and isolated? Or will we draw strength from all our people and the ancient faith in the quality of human dignity, to become the world’s first truly multiracial democracy? (435).

For Takaki, the answer resides in how we view and treat history. It is important to reject “the Master Narrative of American History” because it excludes minority groups. Instead, Americans must create a more inclusive history that “bridges the divide” and presents “a different mirror” of a shared past (435).

Takaki draws on the analytical insights of Gloria Anzaldúa and her theory of borderlands—“a place where ‘two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory’” (436)—to discuss how Americans can find common ground. In the borderlands Americans are already coming face-to-face with one another. Yet to achieve meaningful changes, it is imperative to create, in Gloria Steinem’s words, a “revolution from within” (436). As Takaki notes, we must “unlearn” much of what we’ve been told about our past and substitute it with “a more inclusive and accurate history of all the peoples of America” (436). For Takaki, California offers a mirror of what this may look like for the rest of the country, for it is a gateway to a multitude of ethnicities and racial groups spanning centuries.

Takaki concludes the book by returning to W. E. B. Du Bois’s observations about “the problem of the color line” (439). He notes that the premise of this problem has changed with “the changing colors of the American people” (439). Major demographic shifts are redefining what it means to be American, and the primary signifier of Americanness—whiteness—is not an accurate representation of the diversity of multicultural America. Again, Takaki emphasizes the importance of history and its role in shaping our understandings of a country founded by diverse peoples with a shared vision of equality for all.

Takaki’s postscript provides an overview of his life, noting the parallels between what he has written as a historian and experienced as a Japanese American growing up and living in the United States. Takaki describes the formative experiences that led to his professional career as a historian and professor of ethnic studies, a field that he established at the University of California, Berkeley, and developed into an undergraduate and graduate program.

The postscript lays out the achievements and challenges that Takaki encountered over his lifetime. For instance, it describes his fraught relationship with his in-laws, who were white and did not approve of his marriage to their daughter until the birth of his son. The postscript also describes Takaki’s role in developing the first black history course at UCLA, where he was hired as an assistant professor. Takaki did not receive tenure at UCLA despite his impressive teaching reviews and scholarship, though he later accepted a tenured position at UC Berkeley.

Finally, the postscript describes Takaki’s approach to American history, an endeavor that he frames through epistemological questions of, “How do I really know what I know about American history?” (444). From these kinds of questions, Takaki develops a comparative and inclusive perspective to better understand racial inequality.