Takaki addresses diversity in annual C2C speech
Cal-Berkeley professor urges students to "comprehend" and "change" the world.
Young Shin Park
Issue date: 9/30/08 Section: News
|
Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California-Berkeley, spoke to an audience of over 800 people at Hamline United Methodist Church for the Commitment to Community keynote address.
"The task for us is not only to comprehend the world but also to change the world," he said in an interview before his speech.
"And in comprehending the world ... we are in fact changing the world, because how we see the world determines how we behave, how we act, how we relate to one another and in what legislation we act," he said.
Takaki began his speech by talking about his childhood. He was born in Hawaii, grew up as an ordinary teenager with the nickname "Ten Toes Takaki" and his neighborhood consisted of diverse ethnicities.
It was at the College of Wooster in Ohio where Takaki first experienced culture shock by confronting a "very homogeneous group body" and only a "handful of minority students."
As he walked across the campus, his fellow students would ask him, "How long have you been in this country?" and, "Where did you learn to speak English?", although his grandfather came to the United States in 1886, before many European immigrants.
"My fellow students could not-did not-see me as an American," he said.
"But it's not their fault," Takaki added. "Think about it: what had they learned in a course called American history? What had they learned about Asian Americans, or Puerto Ricans, or Mexican Americans or the native peoples of this continent or African Americans? Nothing."
Wooster students would see him through a filter that he named the "master narrative of American history." Takaki said we live under the master narrative that this country was settled by European immigrants and therefore, Americans are white with European ancestry.
"Not all of us came from Europe. Many of us came from Africa, others came from Asia, others came from Mexico and we are all Americans," Takaki explained.
He said that as the twenty-first century approached, he noticed an awakening of awareness to the idea that America is a nation peopled by the world.
"I wanted to write a history for these people-for this nation. That's why I wrote A Different Mirror," he said.
By pausing his speech to give a 15 minute history lecture, explaining how Irish and Chinese immigrants first came to America, he demonstrated how he teaches diversity concretely.
He addressed that people around the world continue to immigrate to America and we have to become listeners.
Takaki also mentioned his experience of working with a black student union at UCLA and how students at Berkeley made faculty do the right thing by making a multicultural curriculum mandatory.
"Student can make a difference. Students can transform institution and students can have agency," Takaki said, and the audience answered with resounding applause.
During an interview before his speech he expressed his support for Barack Obama and said his overall goal is what Obama is doing today-"[to] bring Americans together across the racial divide, class divide and gender divide."
Be the first to comment on this story