Hispanics receive a lopsided treatment as well. And he totally ignores the experiences of Eastern and Southern Europeans. Similarly, Takaki details the problems of early Irish immigrants without so much as mentioning their subsequent assimilation into American life.
But even when he comes, for instance, to American Jews, Takaki says virtually nothing about their record of economic and cultural achievement the last we hear of them in this book, Jews are still the victims of anti-Semitic housing discrimination in New York and still widely barred from universities. What he does add, loudly and clearly, is another shrill voice to the leftist multicultural chorus.įully five of Takaki’s twelve historical chapters focus on the travails of Indians and blacks, an emphasis that itself contributes mightily to the impression of America as a failed experiment.
For the most part Takaki draws heavily from secondary sources and adds little in the way of new scholarship. Takaki’s “history” proceeds largely by anecdote, relying on obscure poems, diary entries, and newspaper accounts to flesh out his portrait of America as a bleak sinkhole of wasted efforts and futile hopes. Landowning whites may have begun the process by portraying Indians and blacks as savages forever outside the reach of civilization, but once under way, this unstoppable and systematic “demonization” relentlessly “set a course for the making of a national identity in America for centuries to come.”
What all oppressed groups in America share, Takaki concludes, is just this sordid legacy of discrimination.
Although ostensibly aiming to affirm America’s racial diversity, what A Different Mirror mostly offers is a history of ethnic persecution, from the federal government’s cheating of Choctaw Indians out of their ancestral homes in Georgia, to the long hours of drudgery endured by Irish domestic servants, to the job losses suffered disproportionately by blacks during the Depression.
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