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Educating the New America

Ronald Takaki, author and U.C. Berkeley professor. Photo by Yvonne Lai.

Q&A with ethnic studies pioneer Ronald Takaki

By Neela Banerjee

With the impending U.S. Census report expected to reveal America’s changing demographics, the multicultural reality faces us more clearly than ever before. Dr. Ronald Takaki, professor of ethnic studies at U.C. Berkeley and author of six books, has been working for 30 years to promote a greater understanding of the differences that create diversity. In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Little Brown and Company, 1993), Takaki compared the histories of non-white Americans and asked what it really means to be American. Here, he speaks about the state of ethnic studies in America today and in the future.

AsianWeek: How did you get started as a scholar of ethnic studies?

Ronald Takaki: I was a student here at Berkeley in the 1960s and I was inspired by the moral vision of Martin Luther King and I participated in the free speech movement of 1964, which essentially was a movement for civil rights. I graduated from Berkeley in 1967 with a Ph.D. in history and I went to UCLA to teach the first black history course. While I was teaching [there], I looked at the faces of the students in my class and I saw not only the faces of American students, whose ancestry went back to Europe and Africa, but also Asian American and Mexican American students. I thought it would be important to rethink ... race in our history and to offer a comparative course on racial inequality that includes the histories of Asian Americans and Mexican Americans. That was in the late ’60s. I joined the Berkeley faculty in 1972, almost 28 years now, and I brought that course with me to Berkeley. It was called “Racial Inequality in America: A Comparative Perspective.” That course has become, at Berkeley, Ethnic Studies 130, which forms a basis for the ethnic studies undergraduate major and also the ethnic studies Ph.D. program.

AW: What was the climate like when you first started to identify yourself as an ethnic studies scholar? Was it difficult to get books published?

RT: I did not have trouble finding publishers. Already, ethnic studies was emerging as an important field. Our society was aware of the racial crisis. Watts had exploded in 1965 and that was the reason why UCLA had appointed me to teach … The 1970s was a time of immense turmoil, too. People were interested in publishing works that studied racial inequality and the diversity of society. The problem was not so much the publishers but the professors, the faculty. We were viewed as threats to their fields and their views of what constituted a university education. We experienced a hostile reaction from the academy. In fact, there were best-selling books that were published that attacked multiculturalism such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Disuniting of America.

AW: When was it that you felt this reaction?

RT: Actually, it started from the very beginning. While I was teaching that first course in racial inequality, I published my first book entitled Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America. It was published in 1979 by a very prestigious publishing house, Alfred Knopf. It was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, which was quite a coup for this book. But [the scholar] who reviewed it was C. Van Woodward, then regarded as the dean of American history. Usually there are two or three books reviewed in one essay. But [in this case] there was only one book reviewed and it was mine. And it was an attack—an out-and-out attack on the book, and it accused me of anti-white racism. When you ask when the hostility reaction began, it began from the very beginning with the publication of Iron Cages.

AW: Did this reaction surprise you? Did it affect your work?

RT: I think that it was to be expected. What I always try and do as a multicultural scholar is to challenge the master narrative of American history. And this is a narrative that we are all taught. We are taught that the history of America is a history of immigrants from Europe, and that American means white or European in ancestry. Here, in Iron Cages, I was challenging that history. And out of Iron Cages came Strangers from a Different Shore, which represented a criticism of this master narrative by concretely arguing that not all immigrants came across the Atlantic, that many of us came across the Pacific, and our experiences in this country were different from the experiences of European immigrants. We were not the people who could be assimilated into American society. We experienced racism—which was different than the ethnocentrism that the Irish and Jewish immigrants experienced. Strangers From a Different Shore was intended to challenge the notion that American means white.

AW: Was the reaction to Strangers the same as the reaction to Iron Cages?

RT: I found by the time Strangers came out in 1989 there was more receptivity to diversity. It was different than in 1979 when Iron Cages was attacked. By 1989, American society began to realize there was something wrong with the picture that had been presented. They began to realize that Americans came from many different shores and that racial inequality has been a reality in our history. By 1989, there was also growing awareness of the ethnic and racial diversity of American society itself. Time magazine had a cover story in 1992 with the headline “America’s Changing Colors.” This is Time Magazine, a very mainstream, popular publication announcing that sometime in the 21st century, whites will become a minority group just like Americans from Asia, Africa and the Americas. There was a growing awareness, not an acceptance, of America’s racial and ethnic diversity by the early 1990s.

AW: How did the backlash and literature, like Bloom and Schlesinger, affect ethnic studies and your own scholarship? How did it affect the academic circles and students?

RT: We did have the culture wars and the Blooms and the Schlesingers gave ammunition to our campus critics. Bloom and Schlesinger accused us of being doctrinaire and disuniting America by emphasizing our difference and highlighting racism. I think that in terms of the debate, it was a good debate. Thirty years ago people like Bloom and Schlesinger would not have had to write books about us because we were not there. But the fact that we are here and we are publishing and requiring intellectual respect made it necessary for them to write entire books attacking us. That is a good indicator for me. The culture wars debates have been good. They have forced us to look critically at what we believe and know.

AW: Recently there has been talk about the decline in the number of ethnic studies majors at Berkeley. What do you think is causing this decline, and is this a national trend?

RT: The situation at Berkeley is complicated, as it is complicated at other schools across the country. Actually, there has not been a decline in interest in ethnic studies at Berkeley. Our enrollment is up, but we have experienced a decline or a leveling off of ethnic studies majors. There is a reason for that, which comes out of a victory. In 1989, the students at Berkeley won a battle against the faculty. They forced the faculty to approve a multicultural requirement for graduation called the American Cultures requirement, so that every student who wants to graduate from Berkeley must take a course designed to deepen and broaden their understanding of our society’s ethnic and racial diversity. Since then, the Berkeley faculty has developed a list of courses that will fulfill this requirement. And these are taught by faculty in 30 departments. Because of this requirement we have transformed the content of the Berkeley curriculum in the social sciences and humanities. This curriculum is much more diverse culturally and ethnically.

But because of this victory, the students have been switching their majors. Now that we have the American cultures requirement we do offer an American studies major based upon these required courses. Many students, who would have otherwise majored in ethnic studies, have now chosen to major in American Studies. So the number of our majors has leveled off or declined and the American studies majors have inclined sharply.

AW: Is this leveling off a problem for ethnic studies departments?

RT: There is a problem because budgets are based on the number of students majoring in a department. So, we are not in a strong negotiating position to ask for budgetary increases as we did in the past. This is a problem in terms of expansion of our resource base.

AW: What do you think of Professor Ling-chi Wang’s [chair of the ethnic studies department] idea to merge ethnic studies and American studies into one department?

RT: I feel two ways about it. I have dedicated most of my life as a teacher and a scholar to ethnic studies. We are talking about 33 years of my life. And I always like to identify myself as a professor of ethnic studies and not as a professor of history, even though my Ph.D. is in history, because I want to give the field of ethnic studies a name and a scholarly respectability. I feel strongly that we should preserve our identity as ethnic studies, on the other hand, when you think about American studies, what is American studies? American studies is the study of people of the United States and we are a diverse people. So, American studies is in reality ethnic studies, or should be. Think there should be a chance to transform American studies.

AW: How do you see the state of ethnic studies in America today?

RT: I think there is an incline in the interest. Already in California, the census has announced that whites have become a minority. So in California we are intensely aware of the need for multicultural education, not only in the University but also in K-12. But what is happening in California is also happening in every major city. Educators in these major cities are aware of the need for a more inclusive and more accurate curriculum. .... The detail is in the demography. The demography revealing an America of immense and expanding diversity. By the year 2060, we will all be minorities. I see ethnic studies becoming more and more vibrant in the 21st century.

AW: What is the future of ethnic studies?

RT: I am very optimistic and I think the demographic tide is moving in our direction. There are intellectual and political backlashes, such as with Props. 209 and 187. But these backlashes are signs that the times are changing. Spearheading the struggle for ethnic studies and multicultural studies are Asian American students and there is a reason for that. Again, the numbers are doing the telling. Asian American students are 40 percent of the undergraduate population at Berkeley. At other schools like Princeton, Yale and Harvard the students are around 15 to 20 percent. These are schools where Asian American students are demanding a more inclusive curriculum, a curriculum that will include them. They are at the forefront of the struggle for multicultural studies. When you think about what happened at Columbia University four years ago with the hunger strike, those were Asian American students on hunger strike, supported by African American students and Latino students. Columbia decided to make concessions and now has two positions in Asian American studies and two positions in Latino studies. At Princeton, Asian American students occupied the dean’s office and now Princeton has announced a position in Asian American studies. So I think there is reason to be hopeful. Again, the demography will do the telling.

AW: What have you been working on lately?

RT: I just published a new book entitled Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. It offers a different memory of World War II than the one offered by, say, Steven Spielberg in the movie Saving Private Ryan. We didn’t see any African Americans in that movie and African Americans were there on the beaches of Normandy. I also include the experiences of Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, the Navajos and Jewish Americans and the holocaust. I also have a chapter on Mexican Americans. Half a million Mexican Americans served in the U.S. armed forces. How many Americans know about that?