What kind of historical perspective is takaki advocating for

It is not only more inclusive, but also more accurate to recognize this diversity. The intellectual purpose of multiculturalism is a more accurate understanding of who we are as Americans. Multicultural education has been misrepresented by the critics of multiculturalism, especially Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

What Schlesinger has done is to equate multiculturalism with Afrocentrism. But Afrocentrism is not multicultural, it's monocultural. And so what Schlesinger has done is to reduce multiculturalism to the shrillness of ethnic separatism manifested in some versions of Afrocentrism.

Does multiculturalism risk being treated as a fad? I don't think it will be a fad because of the changing face of America. By , whites in California will become a minority group just like African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans—and is only three years away. Within three years in California, we will all be minorities. California is only the thin end of a larger entering wedge. Researchers have projected that by around , all of us in the United States will be minorities.

In the coming multicultural millennium, we will be reminded of our diversity every day. It would be a danger for multicultural education to be a fad.

It needs to be up front and central. I often think about the Los Angeles riots of April 29, That night on our TV screens, we saw the black smoke rising to the skies above Los Angeles, the Korean stores burning out of control, and the frightening violence on the streets. But the most powerful image that was beamed out of L. Many of us still hear his words echoing in our minds. He said, "Please, people, we're stuck here for a while.

We can get along, we can work it out. How do we get along unless we learn more about one another in a systematic and informed way? Multiculturalism can help reunite America.

A few months ago, a white elementary school teacher in Brooklyn chose to teach the book Nappy Hair , which celebrates African American hair, to her predominantly African American class.

The teaching of the book provoked parents in the school to make physical threats against the teacher. Incidents such as this have frightened educators. How can educators safely address diversity in the classroom? It's very important for educators to explain clearly to parents what they are doing and why they are doing it. Educators must work with parent organizations to explain why, for example, we're teaching a book called Nappy Hair.

Had that school had open discussions about the texts that teachers would be using in the classroom, parents would know that teachers don't make decisions about what they'll be having their students read in isolation from the community. But there is a larger problem here. Many parents who complain don't attend the parent-teacher meetings. In many cases, these parents are working long hours, and it's very difficult for them to get to meetings in the evening or the late afternoon.

The social and economic contexts make this kind of information sharing very difficult. And that's something that needs to be kept in mind. Educators such as E. Hirsch advocate teaching a curriculum of core knowledge. What is your opinion? I agree with Hirsch. There's knowledge that I think every American should know.

There should be a core. The question, however, is, What should be the content of this core? This is where Hirsch and I differ. At the back of Hirsch's best-selling book, Cultural Literacy, What Every American Needs to Know, a page appendix lists terms that every cultural literate person should know.

If you look at this list, you'll find that it's very Eurocentric. For example, the list includes Ellis Island, but it omits Angel Island. How many Americans have heard of Angel Island? We think of Angel Island as a place to bike, hike, and picnic. However, Angel Island was also the site of the immigration station for Chinese and Japanese immigrants; the remains of it are still there.

We need to include Angel Island in a list for cultural literacy. So I agree with Hirsch that we need a core, but the question is, Whose core will this be? I would like this core to be reflective of a more accurate understanding of who we are as Americans. Do you think the standards movement is helpful in promoting this core?

The problem is that these standards are often set by bureaucrats. More educators should come together and determine what core knowledge is and engage one another in dialogue and debate. Just the term standards is intimidating. It suggests rigidity. Knowledge is something that is more vibrant, more fluid. I would be reluctant to endorse or promote standards. The question is, Where are the standards going to be made? Many people making them in the agencies are not educators.

How do class differences factor into multicultural education? People often discuss multiculturalism in terms of race and ethnicity, but what about class? Class is very important. Most of us wouldn't even be here if it were not for the demand for the labor of our ancestors.

Jews, for example, were needed as workers in the garment industry. And the Irish were needed to build the railroads and to work in the textile mills. My Japanese grandfather would not be here had it not been for the need for his labor on the sugar plantations of Hawaii. Class is a hidden reality of American history. We overlook class, but class is central to the ethnic experience, including the experience of European immigrant groups.

This is where multiculturalism can bring us together. When we examine our history, we will all find that we are linked to one another in terms of our class in intricate ways. Take, for example, slavery. How many Americans really know why slavery was established in what would become the United States?

Many people have this notion that slavery just began when the first 20 Africans were landed by a Dutch slave ship in Jamestown, Virginia, in But actually, those first 20 Africans were not slaves. They became indentured servants. There was no law for slavery in the English colonies at that point. Even in , 55 years later, blacks constituted only 5 percent of the total population in the Virginia colony.

If slavery was such a profitable institution, why didn't these white planters bring in more labor from Africa? Well, they had this vision of Virginia as a reproduction of English society in the New World.

Hence, there was resistance to the importation of large numbers of non-English, especially laborers who did not look European. The Virginia planters did not want to bring in Africans, but they did bring in large numbers of white indentured servants from England and Ireland. But these white indentured servants had the right to bear arms. That was an English right.

In , they engaged in Bacon's Rebellion; the rebels burned down Jamestown. And the rebellion was repressed only after British troops came to Virginia.

After Bacon's Rebellion, the planter class realized that it would be dangerous to depend on a white laboring class that had the freedom of assembly and the right to bear arms. At that point, the planter class decided to shift from white indentured servitude to enslaved African labor. African labor was denied the right of assembly and the right to bear arms. The working class could be disarmed because of race. By , the black population in Virginia had risen from 5 to 40 percent.

This was when slavery became an institution. The point I'm making involves the relationship between class and race. Racial diversity was forged in the crucibles of white class conflict. Black workers were used and pitted against white workers. And white workers who were also economically exploited and degraded thought that they belonged to a white aristocracy. During the Civil War, these white workers went to war and were killed to defend an institution that did not benefit them economically or socially.

So when the president is asked to apologize for slavery, the question I have to ask as a historian is, Apologize to whom? It's not just to Africans and their descendants, but also to the white workers who were then pitted against these newly imported workers from Africa. Race is tied intricately to class.

When we understand this intricate tie that binds us, we begin to see that we do share much common ground in class. Why do you distinguish between race and ethnicity? In American history, Americans who had distinct physical characteristics because of their skin color or the shape of their eyes represented an ethnic group because they had different religions and different cultures—but they also represented a racial group.

And people were stigmatized because of their distinct physical characteristics. And this led to legislation against them, like slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the internment of Japanese Americans.

You have to make a distinction between ethnic experience and racial experience. To lump together race and ethnicity violates this complex reality. I am a scholar who strives to make the distinction between race and ethnicity. European immigrant groups were ethnic groups. They represented different religions. And Catholics and Jews suffered the oppression of ethnocentrism inflicted upon them by a Protestant America.

But because they were white, they were eligible for naturalized citizenship, and they were able then to exercise political power and advance their economic and social interests. On the other hand, Asian immigrants were not eligible for naturalized citizenship. The Naturalization Act of specified explicitly that to be eligible for naturalized citizenship, you first had to be white—and it used the term white.

You might think, "That was And because of this law, my grandparents never became U. How is that for an example of the difference between race and ethnicity? What are your thoughts on bilingual education? Students who go through a good bilingual education program learn English with greater competency and rapidity than students who are just immersed in English-only classrooms. Should the history of these American peoples be part of a history of the United States or part of the history of other nation-states such as France, Spain, and Mexico?

Just as important, how do we treat the history of those peoples who were once part of a polity that became the United States but which is not now part of the United States? Such a question comes naturally to colonialists, especially to people like myself who are interested in that part of British America that lay in the Caribbean. The American Revolution precipitated an artificial separation between Britain's mainland and island possessions, but before the Revolution mainland and island colonies were intimately and intricately tied.

Places like Barbados are seldom included in general histories of America, but in the 17th century Barbados was at least as important to American development as such heavily studied areas as Virginia and Massachusetts. I note that Professor Takaki devotes a whole chapter of his excellent book A Different Mirror to early Virginia and gives much attention to early New England. Whether Barbados and other West Indian islands should be included within general surveys of American history is debatable, but I would argue that without including Barbados we cannot understand such important topics as how slavery was introduced into America and why South Carolina—a not unimportant part of the United States in the history of 19th-century America—developed as it did.

What bothers me about the type of history advocated by proponents of multicultural history is that the question of what is America and who are Americans is simply considered a given. It is not just Professor Takaki who, to my mind, gives insufficient attention to this important problem. Readers of the William and Mary Quarterly, an audience less likely than most to automatically equate America with the nation-state of the United States, were regaled recently by an essay by James Hijiya.

The essay chided us for ignoring the history of those parts of present-day United States that were not part of British America, but the article omitted to discuss parts of British America that most colonial historians consider part of early America but that did not become part of the United States-Quebec, Barbados, and Jamaica, for example. How can historians of America interested in "our" past and" our" ancestors continue to cite, as a perusal of textbooks on my bookshelf suggests is now almost obligatory, the experiences of Olaudah Equiano as a guide to the African experience in the United States?

Takaki himself gives more space to Equiano than to any other early American except Thomas Jefferson in A Different Mirror, suggesting that Africans coming to early Virginia probably experienced the Middle Passage much as did Equiano, who provides a rare chronicle of that experience. He was shipped to Barbados, spent seven years at sea, lived in Montserrat, the Bahamas, the Mosquito Shore, and Britain where he died , and seems to have spent very little of his remarkable life on the North American continent.

As an African who lived principally in the Caribbean and Britain, and who had no descendants who were residents of the Urtited States, Equiano is a marginal participant at best in a multicultural history of the United States. I do not wish to be thought entirely unsympathetic to the development of multicultural history by practitioners of American history.

Including within American history peoples previously excluded from ''your'' nation's history is clearly desirable both from the perspective of scholarship and nation building. Professor Takaki's recent history of multicultural America is a signal advance on other general syntheses of American history.

I agree wholeheartedly with Professor Takaki that "America does not belong to one race or one group of people. Tags: Letters to the Editor.