A Different Mirror for Young People

This book presents a multicultural history of the United States, arguing that the dominant version of American history, which Ronald Takaki calls the "Master Narrative," wrongly defines Americans as white and of European descent. Takaki, a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, opens with his own story as the son of a Japanese immigrant father and a Japanese American mother, raised in a working-class Hawaiian neighborhood. A teacher inspired him to attend college in Ohio, where white classmates assumed he was a foreigner. These experiences shaped his conviction that the nation must study its diverse past to prepare for a future in which all Americans will be minorities. As a corrective, Takaki traces the intertwined histories of African, Asian, Irish, Jewish, Latino, Mexican, Muslim, and Native Americans.

The book begins with early encounters between Europeans and Native Americans. Takaki argues that England's colonization of Ireland established the template for treating indigenous peoples as "savages": English colonizers forbade the Irish from owning property or holding office, burned villages, and slaughtered families. These tactics carried to North America. At Jamestown, founded in 1607, the tobacco boom drove demand for cleared Indian land, and English commanders burned villages and poisoned Indians under pretenses of peace. In New England, colonizers benefited from massive Indian deaths caused by European diseases, interpreting the devastation as God "making room" for white settlers.

Takaki examines how slavery took root in Virginia. The first 20 Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619 not as slaves but as indentured servants, laborers bound to work for a master for a set period before gaining freedom. Over time, Black people were singled out for harsher treatment, including lifetime servitude. After Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, when an armed force of Black and white laborers burned Jamestown, the planter elite chose African slavery over improving conditions for white workers. Virginia's Black population rose from 5 percent in 1675 to over 40 percent by 1750.

The book follows Native American dispossession westward. President Andrew Jackson forced 70,000 Native Americans from their lands in the 1830s. The Cherokee, under Principal Chief John Ross, resisted removal until federal troops marched them west in the winter of 1838-1839; more than 4,000 died on what became known as the Trail of Tears. On the Great Plains, railroad expansion destroyed the buffalo herds that sustained tribes like the Pawnee. The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up reservations into individual allotments, with "surplus" land sold to whites; by 1933, Native Americans had lost about 60 percent of the land they held when the act passed. At Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, soldiers opened fire on surrendered Sioux, killing hundreds of men, women, and children.

Takaki examines African Americans' parallel struggles. In the pre-Civil War North, free Black people faced segregation, menial jobs, and mob violence. In the South, 4 million people were enslaved by 1860. Frederick Douglass, born into slavery around 1818, secretly learned to read and escaped to become a leading abolitionist. The Civil War brought emancipation, but without land, formerly enslaved people became sharecroppers trapped in cycles of debt. Jim Crow laws, named for a minstrel-show caricature, enforced racial segregation, while hundreds of lynchings terrorized Black communities. In the early 20th century, tens of thousands of African Americans migrated to Northern cities, drawn by World War I labor shortages and fueling the Harlem Renaissance.

Over 4 million Irish immigrants came to the United States during the 19th century, including about 1.5 million who fled during the Great Famine of the 1840s and 1850s, when a potato blight destroyed Ireland's primary food source. In America, they built roads, canals, and railroads. Because they were white, the Irish could become naturalized citizens, unlike Asian immigrants, and used this advantage to gain political power in Northern cities, often at the expense of African Americans with whom they competed for jobs.

Chinese immigrants, drawn by the California Gold Rush beginning in 1849 and by railroad construction, faced escalating hostility. They built the Central Pacific Railroad under dangerous conditions. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States and denied those already present the right to citizenship. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed city records, inadvertently allowing Chinese men to claim American birth and bring families from China, including "paper sons" who entered by claiming to be sons of citizens.

Japanese immigrants arrived in Hawaii and the mainland beginning in the 1880s. Unlike the mostly male Chinese migration, Japanese emigration included many women, some of whom were "picture brides" married through arranged exchanges of photographs. Japanese farmers transformed California agriculture but faced the Alien Land Law of 1913 and the 1924 Immigration Law, which effectively ended Japanese immigration.

Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms, or organized massacres, in Russia settled on New York's Lower East Side beginning in the 1880s, bringing sewing skills to the garment industry. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 killed 146 workers. Major strikes in 1909 and 1910 won improved conditions and launched a decade of union growth. Jews emphasized education, but their success provoked nativist backlash, including the restrictive Immigration Law of 1924.

Mexican Americans, incorporated into the United States through the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, saw their land seized by Anglo settlers through legal manipulation, squatting, and economic pressure. New waves of immigrants crossed the border in the early 20th century to provide essential agricultural labor. During the Great Depression, about 400,000 Mexicans, including many US-born children, were forcibly deported through a program called repatriation.

World War II exposed contradictions between fighting fascism abroad and tolerating racism at home. Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forcibly relocated to internment camps despite no evidence of disloyalty, while 33,000 Japanese American men served with distinction in the military. Navajo servicemen known as "code talkers" transmitted battlefield messages in their unbreakable language during Pacific campaigns. African Americans served in a segregated military. Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Half a million Mexican Americans enlisted. Jewish Americans confronted the Holocaust as the US government largely refused to admit refugees even as 6 million Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps.

The postwar decades brought sweeping change. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional. Rosa Parks's 1955 refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, helped spark the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Sit-ins, freedom rides, and the 1963 March on Washington pressured Congress to pass landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. Yet legal victories could not overcome economic inequality; assassinations, urban riots, and competing visions of Black Power and integration fractured the movement. In 2008, the United States elected its first Black president, Barack Obama, though racial and economic challenges persisted.

New immigration waves reshaped America after the 1965 Immigration Law removed racial restrictions. Vietnamese refugees fled after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Afghan Americans faced anti-Muslim hostility after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants, many driven north by poverty worsened by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994, became the focus of fierce debate.

Takaki closes by recounting his 1997 visit to the White House, where he helped President Bill Clinton craft a speech on race. Clinton told a graduating class that within their grandchildren's lifetimes "there will be no majority race in America" (337). Takaki catalogs victories won by marginalized groups, from the abolition of slavery to the 1988 congressional apology for Japanese internment, and asserts that diversity is the nation's destiny. The book ends with the words of Langston Hughes, an African American poet: "Let America be America again. / Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— / Equality is in the air we breathe" (340).