Can America Survive as a Multiracial Democracy?

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A popular cliché in motivational seminars and creative writing classrooms is “The main thing is to keep the main thing.” The main thing of 2024 is the fight over the United States’ potential to continue evolving into a multiracial democracy.

The late historian Ronald Takaki understood and underscored the main thing of American history in his 1994 masterpiece, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Thirty years after its publication, Takaki’s disquisition on the American experiment functions not only, as its title suggests, as a mirror but also as a crystal ball.

The electoral contest between Vice President Kamala Harris, a black and Indian child of immigrants, and Donald Trump, who poet Martin Espada calls a “sock puppet for bigots,” captures the ideological collision that Takaki explores in A Different Mirror. I recently revisited this book because it remains vital as the country roils and remains an inscrutable contradiction. It’s still a land of opportunity; assimilation doesn’t mean the annihilation of one’s ethnic self. This grand experiment still works, and simultaneously, the gathering storm of a second Donald Trump presidency looms. In recent days, the 78-year-old’s rhetoric has turned darker, more malignant, and ethnically based. How else to explain his rants about the Congo? Or instead of seeing Venezuelans as refugees from socialist tyranny as miscreants emptied from Caracas jails? Or the constant jabs at China or trans-Americans?

Takaki, born and raised in pre-statehood Hawaii, the son of Japanese immigrants, was an unlikely figure to create one of the first ethnic studies programs in the United States. More interested in surfing than studying, he was called “Ten-Toes Tataki.” Only with a teacher’s encouragement did he end up at the tiny College of Wooster in Ohio. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley with a thesis on the effort to revive the slave trade banned in the Constitution, Takaki saw America as brimming with the promise of “diversity becoming manifest destiny.” He argued that it would have to overcome prejudice and paranoia to realize its potential. A nation of immigrants is also a nation of xenophobia.

He wrote that the U.S. was constantly struggling between the “master narrative”—the idea that “American means white” and the “different mirror,” a multicultural nation where a wide variety of peoples coalesce to contribute to the story of their national community. His take put him in the middle of warring factions, criticized from the left for seeing the country as moving toward the fulfillment of its ideals, albeit painfully slowly, and blasted by the right as a politically correct doomsayer dwelling too much on the nation’s history of oppression, discrimination, and xenophobia.

With A Different Mirror, he aimed to correct what he identified as a “shortsighted” tendency of scholars of which even he felt guilty—that is, to write about one racial or ethnic group in isolation and miss “the bigger picture” of how even if each group’s history is unique, all of the stories are connected. Through their connection, like puzzle pieces, they form the clearest picture of the United States.

Takaki opens A Different Mirror with a familiar anecdote, especially for those of Asian heritage. A cab driver in Norfolk, Virginia, asked him, “How long have you been in this country?” Takaki explained that his ancestors migrated from Japan in the 1880s and that he had never lived anywhere else. “I was wondering,” the cabbie replied, “Because your English is excellent.”

Takaki wrote, “Questions like the one that my taxi driver asked me are always jarring. But it was not his fault that he did not see me as a fellow citizen: what had he learned about Asian Americans in courses called ‘U.S. history’? He saw me through a filter…”

Takaki uses the “filter” to introduce his concept of the “master narrative” and spends roughly 500 pages delineating Walt Whitman’s portrait of America: “A teeming nation of nations” and “a vast, surging hopeful army of workers.”

The stories that propel the book are varied: Black Union soldiers who helped to save the nation, Chinese railroad workers who built a prosperous country, and Jewish workers and intellectuals who helped to make business and academia, the Irish, the Italians, the Mexicans, and the Puerto Ricans – all part of the mosaic that is the United States.

Takaki’s America is a country of brutality and beauty. Its hatred and oppression toward “strangers from different shores” is also a story of the once excluded and despised using the mechanisms of constitutional democracy, along with their talents and solidarity, to overcome systemic racism and more intimate forms of hostility. As Blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, and others advanced, the country became more vibrant. Political movements, when working in a “rainbow coalition,” to quote Jesse Jackson’s famous phrase, prove that democracy is expansive. The same insight is extractable from the heroic struggles of women, the disabled, and gay and transgender Americans.

Revisiting Takaki 2024 is an intellectual whirlwind. Are we in the past, present, or future? Takaki quotes the New York Times editorial board in 1930 that it was “folly” to believe that Mexican migrants “can be absorbed and incorporated into the American race.” Three years earlier, many civic leaders, including the then president of Harvard, signed a petition warning against the “Mexicanization of the Southwest.” They cited the same demographic concerns currently prevalent in right-wing media: Mexicans and other immigrants would have more children than “traditional,” meaning white families, speeding the end of America rather than its renewal.

Alarming numbers of Republicans in 2024 believe in the Great Replacement Theory, which casts “globalists” hell-bent on diluting white authority with mass migration and multiculturalism. Trump, who operates not only as the Republican presidential nominee but also as a reactionary cult leader, has openly discussed how immigrants “poison the blood” of our country. Similar delusions of hatred led his running mate, J.D. Vance, to claim that Haitian migrants were abducting and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

It is also striking to read A Different Mirror during a period of exploding antisemitism. Trump posits that Jews would “be to blame” if he lost the election, while his billionaire benefactor, Elon Musk, has repeatedly shared and liked posts on X about how Jews encourage the “hatred of whites.” Meanwhile, the far left has morphed “Zionist” into an antisemitic slur, going far beyond criticism of Israel’s prosecution of the Mideast war to celebrate Hamas and Hezbollah, depict the Jewish state as a font of “settler colonialism,” and harass Jewish students on college campuses. Jews, despite constituting only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, are now the targets of 60 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes.

Takaki foresaw the hate engulfing Jews. He describes how when Jewish immigrants peddled fruits on the streets of American cities, antisemites called them “dirty” and accused them of harboring communist sympathies. As they acquired success, Jews became the orchestrators of a capitalist conspiracy.

Jews face the brunt of hate crimes in 2024. Still, it was only a few years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that assaults against Asian Americans were reaching frightening levels in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities. Takaki wrote stirringly about the contradiction of Hawaiian and Japanese-American school children learning about the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights only to go home to parents who were grinding out long hours on plantations with little protection or liberty.

The prejudicial notion that Asians are “exotic,” “mysterious,” and, therefore, untrustworthy fueled the attacks against Chinese railroad workers in the early 20th century. The internment of the Japanese during World War II echoes today. The belief that COVID-19 was a Chinese “bioweapon” gone wrong remains unproven, and even if it were, Chinese Americans obviously bear no fault.

As Takaki ushers readers closer to the present, the story becomes inspirational. The Civil Rights revolution that Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and thousands of foot soldiers made possible enabled all the previously exiled groups—Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, and others—to demand the fulfillment of the promise the founding documents articulated on their behalf. The United States has a democracy with an unlimited capacity for improvement and growth. Those with seemingly the least justification for believing in the American promise organized to bring it into reality.

In the revised edition of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Takaki writes that in June 1997, he was sitting in his home office when the phone rang. It was Doris Matsui, a member of President Bill Clinton’s staff and the spouse of the then Representative Robert Matsui. She explained that the president planned to give a major speech on race and would like Takaki to help him and his speechwriting team compose it. “He would like to take the national dialogue beyond the black/white binary,” she said.

Takaki recalled how he and Clinton discussed how it wouldn’t be long before the U.S. population had no clear majority. At the time, just as it is now, many cities were becoming minority-majority. Then, there was a reaction against affirmative action and, perhaps, its sloppy application at times. California was banning racial considerations in admissions at state universities—a move that presaged the Supreme Court’s actions this year. Clinton was determined to find a “mend it, don’t end it” approach, recognizing the problem’s treacherous political shoals. The fight over political correctness presaged today’s angst over “woke.”

On June 14th, 1997, President Clinton delivered the address, “One America in the Twenty-first Century: The President’s Initiative on Race,” to the graduating class of the University of California at San Diego. Incorporating Takaki’s analysis, Clinton told the graduates, “A half-century from now, when your own grandchildren are in college, there will be no majority race in America.”

To conclude, Clinton asked the graduates to see the high-stakes decision of their future and the future facing their country: “More than 30 years ago, at the high tide of the civil rights movement, the Kerner Commission said we were becoming two Americans, one white, one black, separate but unequal. Today, we face a different choice: will we become not two but many Americas separate, unequal, and isolated? Or will we draw strength from all our people and the ancient faith in the quality of human dignity to become the world’s first truly multiracial democracy?”

Clinton posed the right question at the right time. Bifurcation was no longer a threat to America. Atomization was.

The same question is on the November ballot. As Americans become more interracial, Vice Harris’s candidacy is an opportunity for a multiracial democracy. Trump’s candidacy is an effort to pull the country back into a dark age of separation, inequality, and isolation.

Harris herself has broadened her vision of race, moving from the narrow binary of her short-lived, failed 2020 campaign, during which she insinuated that Joe Biden was a racist for opposing school busing programs in the 1970s, and refused to question radical leftist slogans, like “Defund the Police.”

In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris embraced her past as a compassionate prosecutor, celebrated the heroic work of black women activists who worked for decades to help make her nomination possible, and bragged about her Indian mother and Jewish husband. She described a country where people of “all races, religions, and creeds” must coalesce to realize their full potential and hailed America as a place where that happens.

Ronald Takaki died at 70 in 2008 by suicide after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis. His work illuminates 2024, and sadly, he never lived to see Barack Obama’s presidency or Harris’s, if there is one. He closed A Different Mirror with a well-known but appropriate quote from Langston Hughes, whose poetic command still reverberates in a country of division with hope for unity: “Let America be America again…Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed…where equality is in the air we breathe.”

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