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A DIFFERENT MIRROR:
TO SEE THE UNITED STATES AS A MULTIRACIAL SOCIETY

By Ronald Takaki

When President Bill Clinton described U.S. society as "multiracial" in his June 14 speech in San Diego, he was not only telling us what we will be in the coming century but also what we have been since our beginnings on the shores of Virginia and Massachusetts in the 17th century.

Within 50 years, he noted, there will be "no majority race" in America. In other words, we will all be minorities. Projections indicate that by 2050, the U.S. population will be about 50 percent white (down from the current 73 percent), 24 percent Hispanic (more than double the current 11 percent), 14 percent African-American (slightly up from today s 12 percent), and 10 percent Asian-American (more than double the present 4 percent). This demographic transformation will occur in California within a few years, and has already taken place in many major cities across the country.

This changing face of America can be feared as a "disuniting of America." But we can also welcome it as an opportunity to acknowledge our diversity and accept a more inclusive view of who we are as Americans.

A history of ourselves as viewed in "a different mirror" reveals that America has a long history as a multiracial society. Both the monolithic view of Americans as white or European in origin and the binary view of Americans as white and black do not accurately reflect our diversity, as it will be in the future or as it has been in the past.

When the first English arrived on the continent's eastern shores in the 17th century, the original peoples had already been here for thousands of years. Then, in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower in Massachusetts, Africans landed in Virginia, brought here by a Dutch slave ship. Africans continued to be brought to the colonies in subsequent years to meet the labor needs of the tobacco plantation economy.

Still, among the colonists, there was the view that this new society should be racially homogeneous -- a New England and a Virginia (named after Queen Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen") which mirrored the population of the old country. Soon after the American Revolution established an independent republic, the U.S. Congress passed a law specifying that only "white" persons were eligible for naturalized citizenship. Several years later, shortly before President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, he told James Monroe that he looked forward to future times when this continent would be covered with "a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws." But the people whom Jefferson saw on the continent were whites only.

Jefferson's acquisition of this western territory, however, opened the way to an expansion that led to the annexation of the Southwest and the inclusion of its Indian and Mexican populations, and also the migrations from China and Japan east to America. By the end of the 19th-century, our modern multiracial society had been forged in the crucible of westward expansion and industrialization. Immigrant laborers from China and Ireland had built the transcontinental railroad, the steel ribbon across the face of America that provided the transportation system for the development of agriculture as well as manufacturing, connecting cities and towns from coast to coast. Irish immigrants worked in New England factories producing textiles from cotton cultivated by enslaved blacks on lands taken from Indians and Mexicans. This reality of our ethnic and racial diversity led 19th-century American author Herman Melville to observe: "The blood of the world flows through the veins of Americans. We are not a narrow tribe."

In addition to the economy that integrated our different groups, there was something deeper, more profound, that united us as Americans. When Jefferson wrote those powerful words, "all men are created equal," he was not extending that "unalienable right" to blacks. The author of the Declaration of Independence was the owner of 200 slaves. But, four score and seven years later, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln redefined equality as a right for everyone, regardless of race. Equality was our nation's central "proposition," he declared, and Americans had an obligation to carry forward this "unfinished work." At Gettysburg, Lincoln reflected on the meaning of the great crisis and also recognized the contributions of 186,000 black soldiers in helping to preserve this Union. Urging his fellow blacks to join the fighting, Frederick Douglass had pointed out that the Constitution stated, "We the People," not "we the white people."

Chinese immigrants also understood this truth. They had initially rushed to the gold fields of California in the 1850s, but those seekers of golden America were followed by tens of thousands who came as agricultural and industrial workers. In 1882, however, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which cut off further Chinese immigration. An immigrant angrily protested against what he saw as unfaithfulness to America's founding principles. "No nation can afford to let go its high ideals," Yan Phou Lee wrote in the North American Review. "The founders of the American Republic asserted the principle that all men are created equal, and made this fair land a refuge for the world. Its manifest destiny, therefore, is to be the teacher and leader of nations in liberty. . . . How far this Republic has departed from its high ideal and reversed its traditional policy may be seen in the laws passed against the Chinese."

Lee's protest was undoubtedly dismissed by most Americans, but the struggle to make this republic live up to its ideals continued as waves of other immigrants flowed into the country. Many of these groups met with prejudice based on perceptions of cultural and ethnic inferiority, but most found enough opportunity to continue the struggle for a more equal society. A turning point occurred during World War II. The fight against Nazi Germany, with its ideology of Aryan supremacy, forced us as citizens of a democracy to face the inconsistency between our ideals and our treatment of racial and ethnic minorities.

This contradiction became the conceptual framework for Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944. While waging this "ideological war" against Nazism, he declared, Americans must apply the principle of democracy more explicitly to race. "Fascism and Nazism are based on a racial superiority dogma . . . and those governments came to power by means of racial persecution and oppression." Therefore, Americans must stand before the whole world in support of racial tolerance and equality. "This country," Myrdal wrote, "has a national experience of uniting racial and cultural diversities and a national theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom and equality for all. The main trend in [this country's] history is the gradual realization of the American Creed."

Affirming this creed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the need to confront Nazism ideologically in order to rally Americans to the war effort. We were fighting, he declared, for the "four freedoms" -- freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Our commitment to these ideals, he explained, condemned racism: "The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of mind and heart. Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry."

Americans of all ethnicities and races fought to defend this democracy. Blacks left the farms of the South and the ghettos of the North, Latinos their barrios, the Chinese their Chinatowns, the Indians their reservations, and some Japanese-Americans even left the internment camps. All those minority members made sacrifices for what they called the "war for double victory" -- the fight against fascism abroad and racism at home. What Lincoln had described as "the mystic chords of memory" stretching from battlefields to patriot graves had become multiracial.

This national reaffirmation of our diversity and our dedication to the "proposition" of equality, forged in the fury of World War II, opened the way for the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. At the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King shared his vision of America's true manifest destiny: "I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.'"

The Civil Rights movement stirred the nation and spurred Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A year later, President Lyndon Johnson went beyond this prohibition of discrimination when he issued Executive Order 11246. Aiming at "the full realization of equal employment opportunity," this law required firms conducting business with the federal government to take "affirmative action." Companies had to set "good faith goals and timetables" for employing "underutilized" qualified minority workers. In his 1966 speech at Howard University, Johnson explained why affirmative action was necessary: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, 'You are free to compete with all others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair....Thus it is not enough to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity -- not just legal equity but human ability -- not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result."

Thirty years later, however, equality as a fact still remains a dream deferred for millions of Americans. We have still to address the overriding issue that W.E.B. Du Bois identified when he predicted that the problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line. In the twilight of this era, this problem has become increasingly perplexing. Work in inner-cities across America has "disappeared," to use the grim description by scholar William Julius Wilson. The disturbingly disproportionate numbers of young black men in prisons confirm the correlation between crime and poverty, while forcing many states to spend more money for prisons than for universities. What Myrdal termed the "American dilemma" has indeed become many dilemmas. The tensions and clashes of race have reached beyond blacks and whites to include Latinos and Asians. The 1992 Los Angeles upheaval seemed to preview a new era of multiracial conflicts.

Within this context of a deepening racial divide and a widening backlash against affirmative action and immigrants, President Bill Clinton gave his speech, "One America in the 21st Century," at the University of California, San Diego, on June 14, 1997. In this historic speech, Clinton was the first president to describe American society as "multiracial." He also urged us to carry forward our nation's "unfinished work," an implicit reference to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Can we work it out? Can we get along in the 21st century? Though to many the prospects do not appear promising, we have reason to be hopeful. The history of multicultural America as seen in "a different mirror" offers us reassurances: The stories of our diverse racial and ethnic groups are different but they are not disparate. Throughout our history, we have been connected to each other as Walt Whitman's "vast, surging, hopeful army of workers" in the building of our country's economy. From the very founding of our nation, we have also struggled in the realization of our political ideals of democracy and equality. This "larger memory" of our varied selves constantly urges us to carry forward our "unfinished work" toward "a more perfect Union."

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Professor Ronald Takaki, of the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993). His next book, A Larger Memory: Voices of Multicultural America, will be published in 1998 by Little, Brown and Company.

U.S. Society & Values
USIA Electronic Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, August 1997