I am sad to report that groundbreaking historian Ronald Takaki died on May 26. Born in 1939, he helped reintroduce the U.S. to Asian America, the people who have been part of this nation from its beginnings and who still struggle to be recognized as Americans today.
Obituary in AsianWeek.
Takaki's book Strangers from a Different Shore helped introduce me to a mulitcultural perspective on U.S. history as a college student. Takaki wasn't the first to question the dominant narrative of what the U.S. was in my life. I already knew black American history, growing up as an African-American disappointed with the one month in our calendar devoted to some of the people who looked like me who built this nation, but I was astonished and proud to see Takaki's history break open the myth of an America created by European immigrants from another perspective. In Strangers from a Different Shore, Takaki revises and updates the entire notion of the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants." From his youth in Hawai'i, Takaki knew that he should feel like he belonged to the land where he was born, but in his own community and on the U.S. mainland, he found himself alienated from the country where his family had lived for generations-- some of them had been here longer than those who questioned his place in society.
Particularly as an African-American, it was mind-blowing to read that in different parts of the country, minority groups who live outside the black/white binary see themselves as the challenging presence that makes America more than the sum of its parts. Asian American movements were a vital part of the making of the U.S., from building the railroads to fighting in World War II (which Takaki documents from a multiracial perspective in Double Victory, some time before Ken Burns) to reclaiming their livelihood from internment and confiscation. While Asian Americans have been pitted against other minority groups, especially by the model minority myth and self-serving notions of intelligence and discipline propagated by white supremacists, Takaki wrote with only righteous indignation and constructive criticism to correct the historical record: Asian Americans, indigenous peoples, Latin@s and Chican@s, African-Americans, and yes, European settlers, have all played their part in the great historical dramas that characterize this nation.
Forwarding the notion of the U.S. as multicultural (and the use of that simple, descriptive, but challenging word that has fallen so far out of favor in contemporary parlance) was not a fashionable contemporary choice for Takaki, but an act of political perspicacity on his part. Inspired by his own heritage and the overwhelming evidence, Takaki's work contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the United States. It did not only emerge from East to West, even though Manifest Destiny expanded its boundaries, but it also came into view from the Pacific coast. It did not only offer enduring promise Europeans and temporary gain to immigrants of color, but it placed settlers from different shores on an uneven playing field and challenged them to stay, even when they said to each other, "Go back where you came from." When the United States becomes your home, your entire life may not always be a celebration, you may not always defend everything it says in your name, but you will be able to defend your claims on it as well as anyone else. And you deserve to make those claims, if you ever hope to triumph over the adversity with which life in this country faces you.
Takaki didn't only write history, he made history. He saw himself, and the country, through A Different Mirror. He told us that our history has always been multicultural, that you can make a particular, strident, tenacious claims to being both Asian and American, and that there are always more things going on than you thought. When I was in college, years after reading his work, my peers and professors brought Takaki to campus to give a public lecture. I thought he actually glowed on that stage, but it was the reflection of the capacity crowd, including me; meeting him was a brief but (I now realize) precious privilege. When I think about how much guff one has to take just to explain that Hawai'i is a part of "America," that African-Americans are often critical of the United States but fiercely defensive about our claims to being American, too, that people of color have a demonstrative record of not just fidelity to but leadership on the ideals of this country, often taking on the roles of authors of those ideals, I think I learned much of that from Ronald Takaki's work. Earlier this year, we lost historian John Hope Franklin. I'm just now old enough to start seeing important thinkers two generations ahead of me crossing over, and it's sad, but enriching. When I see white men having conniptionsover the notion that they'll suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves cast as inferior and shut out of opportunities, despite a lifetime of entitlement and the ability to expect a long future of privileged access to enrichment for themselves and their descendants, I'm baffled. Sometimes I laugh so hard I have to pee, but often, I'm baffled-- because I've read history. I want to say, when I witness the ongoing fever-dreams about the possibility that those privileged by the back-sliding bias of our traditional history might fall behind, "I thought you knew." But without historians like Ronald Takaki, John Hope Franklin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Darlene Clark Hine, and Philip Deloria, we would know nothing but illusions.