THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411100594
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: [Ronald Takaki]
LENGTH: Long : 257 lines
I had flown from San Francisco to Norfolk and was riding in a taxi to my hotel to attend a conference on multiculturalism. Hundreds of educators from across the country were meeting to discuss the need for greater cultural diversity in the curriculum. My driver and I chatted about the weather and the tourists. The sky was cloudy, and Virginia Beach was twenty minutes away. The rearview mirror reflected a white man in his forties.
``How long have you been in the country?'' he asked.
``All my life,'' I replied, wincing. ``I was born in the United States.''
With a strong southern drawl, he remarked: ``I was wondering because your English is excellent!'' Then, as I had many times before, I explained: ``My grandfather came over here from Japan in the 1880s. My family has been here, in America, for over a hundred years.'' He glanced at me in the mirror. Somehow I did not look ``American'' to him, my eyes and complexion looked foreign.
Suddenly, we both became uncomfortably conscious of a racial divide separating us. An awkward silence turned my gaze from the mirror to the passing landscape, the shore where the English and the Powhatan Indians first encountered each other. Our highway was on land that Sir Walter Raleigh had renamed ``Virginia'' in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. In the English cultural appropriation of America, the indigenous peoples themselves would become outsiders in their native land. Here, at the eastern edge of the continent, I mused, was the site of the beginning of multicultural America. . at my destination. I said good-bye to my driver and went into the hotel, carrying a vivid reminder of why I was attending this conference.
Questions like the one my taxi driver asked me are always jarring, but I can understand why he could not see me as American. He had a narrow but widely shared sense of the past - a history that has viewed American as European in ancestry. ``Race,'' Toni Morrison explained, has functioned as a ``metaphor'' necessary to the ``construction of Americanness'': in the creation of our national identity, ``America'' has been defined as ``white.''
But America has been racially diverse since our very beginning on the Virginia shore, and this reality is increasingly becoming visible and ubiquitous. Currently, one-third of the American people do not trace their origins to Europe; in California, minorities are fast becoming a majority. They already predominate in major cities across the country - New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
This emerging demographic diversity has raised fundamental questions about America's identity and culture. In 1990, Times published a cover story on ``America's Changing Colors.'' ``Someday soon,'' the magazine announced, ``white Americans will become a minority group.'' How soon? By 2056, most Americans will trace their descent to ``Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific Islands, Arabia - almost anywhere but white Europe.'' This dramatic change in our nation's ethnic composition is altering the way we think about ourselves. ``The deeper significance of America's becoming a majority nonwhite society is what it means to the national psyche, to individuals' sense of themselves and their nation - their idea of what it is to be American.''
Indeed, more than ever before, as we approach the time when whites become a minority, many of us are perplexed about our national identity and our future as one people. This uncertainty has provoked Allan Bloom to reaffirm the preeminence of Western civilization. Author of The Closing of the American Mind, he has emerged as a leader of an intellectual backlash against cultural diversity. In his view, students entering the university are ``uncivilized,'' and the university has the responsibility to ``civilize'' them. Bloom claims he knows what their ``hungers'' are and ``what they can digest.'' Eating is one of his favorite metaphors. Noting the ``large black presence'' in major universities, he laments the ``one failure'' in race relations - black students have proven to be ``indigestible.'' They do not ``melt as have all other groups.'' The problem, he contends, is that ``blacks have become blacks'': they have become ``ethnic.'' This separatism has been reinforced by an academic permissiveness that has befouled the curriculum with ``Black Studies'' along with ``Learn Another Culture.'' The only solution, Bloom insists, is ``the good old Great Books approach.''
Similarly, E.D. Hirsch worries that America is becoming a ``tower of Babel,'' and that this multiplicity of cultures is threatening to rend our social fabric. He, too, longs for a more cohesive culture and a more homogeneous America: ``If we had to make a choice between the one and the many, most Americans would choose the principle of unity, since we cannot function as a nation without it.'' The way to correct this fragmentization, Hirsch argues, is to acculturate ``disadvantaged children.'' What do they need to know? ``Only by accumulating shared symbols, and the shared information that symbols represent,'' Hirsch answers, ``can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national community.'' Though he concedes the value of multicultural education, he quickly dismisses it by insisting that it ``should not be allowed to supplant or interfere with our schools' responsibility to ensure our children's mastery of American literate culture.'' In Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Known, Hirsch offers a long list of terms that exclude much of the history of minority groups.
While Bloom and Hirsch are reacting defensively to what they regard as a vexatious balkanization of America, many other educators are responding to our diversity as an opportunity to open American minds. . . . Universities from New Hampshire to Berkeley have established American culture diversity graduation requirements. . . . Even the University of Minnesota, located in a state that is 98 percent white, requires its students to take ethnic studies courses. . . .
What is fueling this debate over our national identity and the content of our curriculum is America's intensifying racial crisis. The alarming signs and symptoms seem to be everywhere - the killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit, the black boycott of a Korean grocery store in Flatbush, the hysteria in Boston over the Carol Stuart murder, the battle between white sportsmen and Indians over tribal fishing rights in Wisconsin, the Jewish-black clashes in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, the black-Hispanic competition for jobs and educational resources in Dallas, which Newsweek described as a ``conflict of the have-nots,'' and the Willie Horton campaign commercials, which widened the divide between the suburbs and the inner cities.
This reality of racial tension rudely woke America like a fire ball in the night on April 29, 1992. Immediately after four Los Angeles police officers were found not guilty of brutality against Rodney King, rage exploded in Los Angeles. Race relations reached a new nadir. During the nightmarish rampage, scores of people were killed, over two thousand injured, twelve thousand arrested, and almost a billion dollars' worth of property destroyed. The live television images mesmerized America. The rioting and the murderous melee on the streets resembled the fighting in Beirut and the West Bank. . . .
``Is this America?'' many shocked viewers asked. ``Please, can we get along here,'' pleaded Rodney King, calling for calm. . . . we're all stuck here for a while., Let's try to work it out.''
But how should ``we'' be defined? Who are the people ``stuck here'' in America? One of the lessons of the Los Angeles explosions is the recognition of the fact that we are a multicultural society and that race can no longer be defined in the binary terms of black and white. ``We'' will have to include Hispanics and Asians. . . .
``I don't feel like I'm in America anymore,'' said Denisse Bustamente as she watched the police protecting the firefighters. ``I feel like I am far away.'' Indeed, Americans have been witnessing ethnic strife erupting around the world - the ride of neo-Nazism and the murder of the Turks in Germany, the ugly ``ethnic-cleansing'' in Bosnia, the terrible and bloody clashes between Muslims and Hindus in India. Is the situation here different, we have been nervously wondering, or do ethnic conflicts elsewhere represent a prologue for America? What is the nature of malevolence? Is there a deep, perhaps primordial, need for group identity rooted in hatred for the other? Is ethnic pluralism possible for America?. . .
How did we get to this point, Americans everywhere are anxiously asking. What does our diversity mean?And where is it leading us? How do we work it out in the post-Rodney King era?
Certainly one crucial way is for our society's various ethnic groups to develop a greater understanding of each other. For example, how can African Americans and Korean Americans work it out unless they learn about each other's cultures, histories, and also economic situations? This need to share knowledge about our ethnic diversity has acquired a new importance and has given new urgency to the pursuit for a more accurate history.
More than ever before, there is a growing realization that the established scholarship had tended to define America too narrowly. For example, in his prize-winning study The Uprooted, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin presented - to use the book's subtitle - ``the Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.'' But Handlin's ``epic story'' excluded the ``uprooted'' from from Africa, Asia and Latin America - the other ``Great Migrations'' that also helped to make ``the American People.'' Similarly, in The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schleslinger, Jr., left out blacks and Indians. There is not even a mention of two marker events - the Nat Turner insurrection and Indian removal, which Andrew Jackson himself would have been surprised to find omitted from the history of his era.
Still, Schlesinger and Handlin offered us a refreshing revisionism, paving the way for a study of common people rather than princes and presidents. They inspire the next generation of historians to examine groups such as the artisan laborers of Philadelphia and the Irish immigrants of Boston. ``Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America,'' Handlin confided in his introduction to The Uprooted. ``I discovered that the immigrants were American history.'' This door, once opened, led to the flowering of a more inclusive scholarship as we begin to recognize that ethnic history was American history. Suddenly there was a proliferation of seminal works. . .
But even this new scholarship, while it has given us a more expanded understanding of the mosaic called America, does not address our needs in the post-Rodney King era. These books and others like them fragment American society, studying each group separately, in isolation from the other groups and the whole. While scrutinizing our specific pieces, we have to step back in order to see the rich and complex portrait they compose. What is needed is a fresh angle, a study of the American past from a comparative perspective.
By looking at these groups from a multicultural perspective, we can comparatively analyze their experiences in order to develop an understanding of their differences and similarities. Race, we will see, has been a social construction that has historically set apart racial minorities from European immigrant groups. Contrary to the notions of scholars like Nathan Glazer and Thomas Sowell, race in America has not been the same as ethnicity. A broad comparative focus also allows us to see how the varied experiences of different racial and ethnic groups occurred within shared contexts.
During the nineteenth century, for example, the Market Revolution employed Irish immigrant laborers in New England factories as it expanded cotton fields worked by enslaved blacks across Indian lands toward Mexico. Like blacks, the Irish newcomers were stereotyped as ``savages,'' ruled by passions rather than ``civilized'' virtues such as self-control and hard work. The Irish saw themselves as the ``slaves'' of the British oppressors, and during a visit to Ireland in the 1840's, Frederick Douglass found that the ``wailing notes'' of the Irish ballads reminded him of the ``wild notes'' of slave songs. The United States annexation of California, while incorporating Mexicans, led to trade with Asia and the migration of ``strangers'' from Pacific shores. In 1870, Chinese immigrants were transported to Massachusetts as scabs to break an Irish immigrant strike; in response, the Irish recognized the need for interethnic working-class solidarity and tried to organize a Chinese lodge of the Knights of St. Crispin. After the Civil War, Mississippi planters recruited Chinese immigrants to discipline the newly freed blacks. During the debate over an immigration exclusion bill in 1882, a senator asked: If Indians could be located on reservations, why not the Chinese?
The signs of America's ethnic diversity can be discerned across the continent - Ellis Island, Angel Island, Chinatown, Harlem, South Boston, the Lower East Side, places with Spanish names like Los Angeles and San Antonio or Indian names like Massachusetts and Iowa. Much of what is familiar in America's cultural landscape actually has ethnic origins. . . .
Furthermore, many diverse ethnic groups have contributed to the building of the American economy, forming what Walt Whitman saluted as ``a vast, surging, hopeful army of workers.''
Through their stories, the people who have lived America's history can help all of us, including my taxi-driver, understand that Americans originated from many shores, and that all of us are entitled to dignity. ``I hope this survey do a lot of good for the Chinese people,'' an immigrant told an interviewer at Stanford University in the 1920s. ``Make American people realize that Chinese people are humans. I think very few American people really know anything about Chinese.'' But the remembering is also for the sake of the children. ``This story is dedicated to the descendants of Lazar and Goldie Glauberman,'' Jewish immigrant Minnie Miller wrote in her autobiography. ``My history is bound up in their history and the generations that follow should know where they came from to know better who they are.'' Similarly, Tomo Shoji, and elderly Nisei woman, urged Asian Americans to learn more about their roots: ``We've got such good fantastic stories to tell. All our stories are different.'' Seeking to know how they fit into America, many young people have become listeners; they are eager to learn about the hardships and humiliations experienced by their parents and grandparents. They want to hear their stories, unwilling to remain ignorant or ashamed of their identity and past.
But what is needed in our own perplexing times is not so much a ``distant'' mirror, as one that is ``different.'' While the study of the past can provide collective self-knowledge, it often reflects the scholar's particular perspective or view of the world. What happens when historians leave out many of America's peoples? What happens, to borrow the words of Adrienne Rich, ``when someone with the authority of a teacher'' describes our society, and ``you are not in it''? Such an experience can be disorienting - ``a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.''
Through their narratives about their lives and circumstances, the people of America's diverse groups are able to see themselves and each other in our common past. . . . America does not belong to one race or group, the people in this study remind us, and Americans have been constantly redefining the national identity from the moment of first contact on the Virginia shore. By sharing their [stories, they invite us to see ourselves in a different mirror.] ILLUSTRATION: Photo
About the author:
Ronald Takaki is the grandson of Japanese plantation laborers in
Hawaii. He has a Ph.D. in American history from the University of
California at Berkeley. He taught the first black history course at
UCLA and helped to found UCLA's centers for African American, Asian
American, Chicano and Native American studies. At UCLA, he chaired
the Ethnic Studies Department and was graduate adviser to the Ethnic
Studies Program, the first in the country.
by CNB