Scholar of Ethnic Studies Talks about
Culture Shock and Connections and the Canvas of America
Nov. 14, 2007
The theme of connections was central to the conversation
throughout Dr. Ronald Takaki's appearance at the Jepson
Forum, and as he wove connections among diverse elements
and historical events, Takaki also intertwined them with
stories of his youth and his personal connections to the
issues that eventually became his life's work.
In the autobiographical
portion of his talk, which he lightheartedly entitled
"How a Surfer Became a Scholar," Takaki noted that his
years growing up in Hawaii were single-mindedly devoted
to one passion: hanging ten on his surfboard. "My
nickname," he confessed with a chuckle, "was Ten Toes
Takaki!"
All that changed in
Takaki's senior year in high school, when he developed a
close relationship with a teacher, Dr. Shunji Nishi.
"Dr. Nishi would return my essays with extensive
marginal comments...and epistemological questions," said
Takaki, using the term to launch a discussion of the
importance of epistemology as a critical thinking skill.
Nishi's influence led
Takaki to leave the familiarity of Hawaii for the
College of Wooster in Ohio, where -- removed from his
majority Asian American high school -- he experienced
his first culture shock. Because he had an unusual name
and did not look American, students at the small liberal
arts college peppered Takaki with such questions as,
'How long have you been in this country?' and 'Where did
you learn to speak English?'
"My fellow students at
Wooster saw me through a filter," said Takaki. "I call
this filter the master narrative of American history.
It's a powerful, pervasive story: [that] this country
was settled by European immigrants and that Americans
are white or European by ancestry....
"This master narrative
leaves many of us feeling left out. Not only left out
of history, but left out of America itself."
Although attending Wooster
was an eye-opener for Takaki, it was not the event that
led to his lifelong interest in racial and ethnic
studies. While studying for his Ph.D. in American
history at UC Berkeley, he was horrified by the murders
of three young civil rights activists during Mississippi
Freedom Summer in 1964. He began to wonder about the
origins of racial hatred and violence, and decided to
write his dissertation on slavery.
The next milestone in
Takaki's life was taking a position at UCLA, teaching
its first-ever black history course.
At age 28, he told his
listeners, he walked into an auditorium of 500 seats to
find every space filled and students spilling into the
aisles. He described the "chitter-chatter" that filled
the air, followed by the sudden hush as he walked to the
podium and the student who immediately rose to his feet
to challenge him. "Well, Professor Takaki, what
revolutionary tools are we going to learn in this
class?"
"And I thought to myself,"
Takaki said, recalling the moment four decades later,
"How did I answer this?'
He told the students,
"We're going to study the history of the United States
as it relates to black people, and also we're going to
strengthen and sharpen our critical thinking skills and
our writing skills.
"And these are
revolutionary tools, if you want to make them so."
Before long, Takaki had
befriended black student leaders and members of militant
groups, and was helping them to organize and advocate
for Chicano studies, Asian American studies, and Native
American studies. "The word went out to black students
on college campuses across the country," he said with a
laugh, "about this bad Asian dude." His support for
the militants earned the enmity of senior faculty, and
he was fired from UCLA in 1972. "They called me," he
told the audience with a laugh, "a threat to western
civilization! But I'm glad UCLA fired me. Because UCLA
forced me to go to Berkeley."
At UC Berkeley, Takaki
began pursuing a comparative approach to the study of
race and ethnicity in America, and wrote a series of
books on the subject. The most important of these, he
said, was 20 years in the making: "A Different Mirror:
A History of Multicultural America."
"I wanted to write a book,"
he said of his most celebrated work, "that was
scholarly, but also accessible and immensely readable."
To illustrate the
comparative approach, Takaki went on to give what he
called an interactive "15-minute lecture within a
lecture," using the example of 19th-century immigration
from Ireland and China.
"Why did [the Irish] come?"
he asked his listeners. "And if you said the potato
famine, you're wrong.
"To blame a blight is the
master narrative of British history. 'Don't blame
British imperialism, blame the blight.'"
Tracing the uprooted Irish
across the Atlantic, Takaki called the next part of the
lesson "following the cotton." He examined the
repercussions of the invention of the cotton gin, which
not only revitalized the institution of slavery and
resulted in the expansion of the "cotton kingdom," but
helped lead to the Civil War, the uprooting of Native
American tribes and the war with Mexico.
Concerning the
Mexican-American War, Takaki underscored once again the
pervasiveness of the master narrative. "If you were
alive in 1846, this is what you would have heard about
why the United States declared war on Mexico," he said.
"There was a border dispute...[and] James K. Polk,
president, sent troops into this disputed territory."
Today, said Takaki, historians with access to Polk's
documents know that the war was part of a strategy
pursued by business and political groups with interests
in California.
Periodically, Takaki paused
to make sure the audience had events placed in their
correct chronological context. "When was the
Transcontinental Railroad finished? " he asked. "These
dates are important; I'm not just giving you these dates
for the sake of memorizing. They can help us connect the
dots."
To illustrate the teaching
of history from the bottom up or eye level, Takaki also
read from excerpts of everyday life in the 19th century,
including telegrams sent by Chinese workers and the
lyrics of songs popularized by Irish immigrant women.
Instructing his listeners to consider the telegrams and
song sheets historical documents, and to "listen between
the lines," he drew connections between British
imperialism, the opium wars, and the Chinese and Irish
immigrants who worked on the Transcontinental Railroad.
"So there you have it," he
concluded, "in 15 minutes: the making of multicultural
America. We see the Irish and the Chinese: different,
but connected. And they're also connected to the
stories of African Americans and Native Americans and
Mexicans."
In summing up, Takaki
reminded his audience of the intellectual purpose of
studying history and of asking epistemological
questions.
"How you know something is
important for all of us as intellectuals," he said. "For
example, I wish President George Bush had practiced
epistemology. I wish he'd asked himself, 'How do I know
I know what I know about Saddam Hussein and the weapons
of mass destruction?'....
"Just think, it would be a
different world from the one we're in today."
Within their lifetimes, he
told students in the audience, the United States will
become a nation of minorities. "History can show how
our paths have crisscrossed...
"And
I know all of you as
students of the Jepson School will welcome a message
that I teach my students at Berkeley, and the message is
this: The task for us as intellectuals is to comprehend
the world in order to change the world."
"Notice the order here," he
emphasized. "Comprehending the world is a pre-requisite
for changing the world."
He cautioned against
drawing a dichotomy between scholarship and political
activism. "For me," said Takaki, "intellectual work is
political work.... I think of my scholarship as activist
scholarship. As I tell my students, I love to write
books because writing makes me feel so alive
intellectually, but also politically.
"To write a book like 'A
Different Mirror'," said Takaki, "is a political
statement. It's a redefining of who is an American and
a retaking of our whole system.
"That's political -- and
that can lead to action too."
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