It Began with the Vikings
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
by Ronald Takaki.
Little, Brown. 508 pp. $27.95.
To hear Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley, tell it, America’s problems with multiculturalism began, literally, on day one. Minutes after the Vikings landed on a beach in Vinland ten centuries ago, they slaughtered a group of Indians attempting to hide nearby.
From this first encounter until the 1990’s, Takaki sees nothing but a long trail of suffering, discrimination, and violence.
Although ostensibly aiming to affirm America’s racial diversity, what A Different Mirror mostly offers is a history of ethnic persecution, from the federal government’s cheating of Choctaw Indians out of their ancestral homes in Georgia, to the long hours of drudgery endured by Irish domestic servants, to the job losses suffered disproportionately by blacks during the Depression.
What all oppressed groups in America share, Takaki concludes, is just this sordid legacy of discrimination. Landowning whites may have begun the process by portraying Indians and blacks as savages forever outside the reach of civilization, but once under way, this unstoppable and systematic “demonization” relentlessly “set a course for the making of a national identity in America for centuries to come.”
Takaki’s “history” proceeds largely by anecdote, relying on obscure poems, diary entries, and newspaper accounts to flesh out his portrait of America as a bleak sinkhole of wasted efforts and futile hopes. For the most part Takaki draws heavily from secondary sources and adds little in the way of new scholarship. What he does add, loudly and clearly, is another shrill voice to the leftist multicultural chorus.
Fully five of Takaki’s twelve historical chapters focus on the travails of Indians and blacks, an emphasis that itself contributes mightily to the impression of America as a failed experiment. But even when he comes, for instance, to American Jews, Takaki says virtually nothing about their record of economic and cultural achievement; the last we hear of them in this book, Jews are still the victims of anti-Semitic housing discrimination in New York and still widely barred from universities. Similarly, Takaki details the problems of early Irish immigrants without so much as mentioning their subsequent assimilation into American life. And he totally ignores the experiences of Eastern and Southern Europeans.
Hispanics receive a lopsided treatment as well. Takaki devotes himself only to the hardships of the immigrant generations, ignoring the gains made by second-and third-generation Hispanics throughout the 20th century. Not surprisingly, he makes no mention of Cuban-Americans and their stunning achievements. Nor, in general, does he ask why, in light of the ruthless discrimination he laboriously chronicles, America continues to draw a million new immigrants to its borders each year.
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A solid study of Asian-Americans, the area of Takaki’s purported expertise (he is the author of a previous book on the subject, Strangers from a Different Shore), would provide a good opportunity for showing how the American system can work for nonwhites. Instead, Takaki delivers a diatribe against those who would call Asian-Americans a “model minority.” He dwells almost exclusively on the hurdles faced by the immigrant generation: language barriers, low levels of education, isolation from mainstream society. The reader will learn nothing here about all the high-school valedictorians and hardworking entrepreneurs—nor, for that matter, about the quotas restricting the admission of Asian-Americans to some of our best universities. Although Takaki does allow that “many Asian-Americans are doing well,” he neglects to specify how well: the highest median household income, the highest percentage of college graduates, the highest percentage of scientific and managerial jobs, the lowest divorce rate, and the lowest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country, including whites.
But Takaki has another agenda in mind in denouncing the “model-minority” idea: he calls it a sinister ploy to “discipline blacks.” The stereotype of Asian-American success, Takaki argues, has received wide currency because our society “needs” it, because we are living “in an era anxious about a growing black underclass.” Making his point in, apparently, the only way he can, he stoops to blatant misquotation. “While congratulating Asian-Americans for their family values, hard work, and high incomes,” he writes, “President Ronald Reagan chastised blacks” for their reliance on welfare. But Takaki’s own footnotes show that Reagan never drew this invidious comparison between blacks and Asian-Americans; the link is Takaki’s, yoking two disparate sources set apart by more than six months.
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Anyone who makes his way to the end of this disgraceful book must wonder: if our multicultural past is as replete with racist treachery, and as devoid of promise or hope, as Takaki alleges, how but with terror can we view our increasingly multicultural future? Although Takaki blandly assures us that “we have nothing to fear but our fear of our own diversity,” his book offers no grounds for thinking this country can accept even modest amounts of racial and ethnic diversity. His own solution to this dilemma lies in a bit of New-Age wisdom: “what we need to do is to stop denying our wholeness as members of humanity as well as one nation.” But the only denier hereabouts is Ronald Takaki; the rest of us, with whatever necessary qualifications, can take pride in the knowledge that the American experiment actually works.
