by Daniel Cano
 |
| Book sitting in a neighbor's box, just waiting.... |
As I gave my dog, Phoebe, her evening stroll, I noticed a box of books on the sidewalk. Most were
throwaways, except for one, Ron Takaki’s book, A Different Mirror, a History of Multicultural America (1993). The book was practically new.
Professor Ron Takaki, a Japanese
Californian, by way of Hawaii, died in 2009. He was a preeminent scholar in the
field of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. I’d read Takaki’s book, Strangers
from a Different Shore (1989), his book about Asian migration to the U.S., a
topic few Americans, including me, knew, other than generalities, even though my family was from the West Coast, home to most Asian Americans in the U.S. Our neighbors were Japanese.
In 1990, or
thereabouts, I heard Dr. Takaki speak in an auditorium filled with faculty at Santa
Monica College, where I was teaching at the time. Takaki 's work, his writing and lecturing, was accessible to the public, edifying, engaging, and
entertaining, something snobbish scholars avoided, preferring to couch their work
in oblique academic jargon and complex concepts, I think so they can get away with
calling their discipline a “science,” an old argument in higher education.
Takaki began his lecture by asking, “How many of you know about Ellis Island.?”
Of course, nearly every hand in the auditorium shot
up.
“Good,” Takaki said, and laughed, something of a cackle, like setting up a good joke. He then asked, in a serious tone, “How many of you have heard of Angel Island?”
Slowly,
as if needing to think about it, only a smattering of hands went up. The
majority of educators sat silent. Professor
Takaki went on to explain Angel Island, adjacent to San Francisco, was the West
Coast Port of Entry for Asian immigrants, mostly Chinese and Japanese, in the mid-19th century, "strangers from a different shore." He then asked, “As educators, if we know
about Ellis Island, why don't we also know about Angel Island?” Silence.
After an invigorating and inspiring lecture on his book about Asian America, Takaki made a bold pronouncement. He said something like, “If university
students don’t know the real history of the U.S., and about all the people who
contributed to its creation,” here he raised his voice, “I believe they are not worthy of
a university degree.”
Well, that
got the attention of the erudite crowd. I remember hearing more than a few murmurs
pass through the audience. As the only Chicano professor ever hired by the English department at SMC, about a 70-year-old institution at the time, I knew exactly what Takaki meant.
In the late
1980s, early 1990s, “Ethnic Studies,” as a discipline, was just taking hold in
the academy. In American higher education, the study of other U.S. cultures wasn’t new, but it hadn't yet been organized into a coherent program, department, or discipline. Educators like John
Dewey, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Bell Hooks, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Gloria
Anzaldua, and others had begun looking at U.S. history beyond our mythical
borders, yet, somehow, it threatened many traditional educators who wanted to believe the U.S. was solely a European construct.
When Takaki
opened his talk to a rousing Q&A session, I remember one professor standing and, subtly, accusing Takaki of introducing
an illegitimate field of study into the curriculum, even hinting at the flimsiness of Takaki’s scholarly credentials, maybe assuming Takaki had received a degree in Ethnic
Studies, of which some traditional scholars, like classicist Allan Bloom, were critical. The crowd quieted, waited, uncertainty creeping in. Takaki remained cool. It wasn’t his first time under verbal assault, having led the cultural wars at UC Berkeley.
He
thanked the man for his comment, clarified his doctorate was in American
history, and described the rigorous curricula students needed to study to pass
courses in Ethnic Studies or to receive degrees in the field. Once again, he had the crowd behind him.
Somewhere towards the end of his talk, Takaki said, “Even ‘Whites’ need to take back their history.” He was suggesting Americans, whose ancestors had emigrated from
Europe, to be considered “educated” should know their own cultural backgrounds, whether English, Dutch, Irish, Pole, French, etc., why their ancestors emigrated and settled here, especially since we live in a global world.
I’m nearly half-way through Takaki’s book, a fascinating read. I wish I’d read it earlier, years earlier. It’s storytelling based on historical research, referencing Shakespeare's Tempest, a play about the "other" and moving from the early
days of the United States, starting with the relationship between the colonists
and indigenous inhabitants, citing journals and early writings, and moving on
to Irish and indentured servitude then shifting to early African migration in
the Northern colonies, before slavery was even institutionalized, explaining why and how it
became an institution and affected labor in the United States.
In the
early chapters, Takaki focuses on the founding fathers, from a different
perspective. He’s always respectful, but he doesn’t hold back regarding their “real”
views of slavery, forced labor, or their treatment of the Indians, especially,
men like Thomas Jefferson, who suffered a moral dilemma, introducing laws to
outlaw slavery, yet, at the same, time, building his fortune on the backs of
African labor, while passing laws to take native American lands.
Takaki includes
much about early august Americans that many historians choose to avoid, or
completely ignore, especially harsh language leading to the detriment of those
they considered outsiders, but, understanding, even the outsiders were here to
stay, a part of the complex American tapestry.
I’m looking
forward to the next chapters, where Takaki describes Mexican and Asian
immigrants and how they became American, and the unique challenges they faced.
Where Africans were forced to come to America to work, often
under hellish conditions, the Irish out of starvation and desperation, Mexicans were already here. Later, others chose to
cross the border, for whatever reason, much like the Chinese and Japanese, who emigrated to Gold Mountain, only to learn the gold belonged to someone else.
I’ve always
known about Takaki’s, A Different Mirror, but never took the time to
read it, until now, imagine, after finding it outside a neighbor’s house. Coincidentally,
I’ve been working my way through biographies of the founding fathers, to get a
better grasp of this country’s foundation. In today's discourse, I hear so many people say, “The founding fathers this and the founding fathers that…,” many of them, clearly, understanding little about the men who founded the country.
Some of the early composers and signers of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights were outright atheists and agnostics, lechers and philanderers, brilliant and progressive, some siding with flamboyant France and others with cold, dark England.
Takaki’s
book provides that conceptual foundation, and not in a dry, analytical
scholarly way, but, as I said earlier, wrapped up in engaging stories about people,
based on historical research, often in the words of the historical figures themselves, documented in diaries and letters, as uncomfortable and disconcerting as those words might be.
They are part of
our history, the history that makes us all Americans, even if there are those who will never accept us, those who choose to muddy up basic historical study with complex concepts, like Critical Race Theory (CRT), a study that has no bearing on ethnic studies.
For me, I’ll
keep my eye out for books in boxes outside neighbors' homes, especially now that we
have so few bookstores in town, and no "used bookstores" at all, another way, I guess, to keep us all uniformed and ignorant.
Daniel Cano is author of the novels Pepe Rios, Shifting Loyalties (Arte Publico Press, University of Houston), and the award-winning, Death and the American Dream (Bilingual Press, Arizona State University).
