A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, by Ronald Takaki (Little, Brown, 508 pp., $27.95)

THESE two books represent extremes in scholarship on America's greatest ambition--to be a free and self-governing nation of many nations. Racial and ethnic conflict at home undermines the example America gives peoples seeking peace from such struggles abroad. Can America afford the world, following George Washington's admonition, "the magnanimous and too novel example of a People always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence"? This is the deepest question these books raise.

Mexican Americans, by UCLA political scientist Peter Skerry, is an important book that offers common-sense reflections on ethnic politics in general and Mexican-American politics in particular. Mr. Skerry's careful scholarship helps his readers thoughtfully address current issues such as immigration, bilingual education, and ethnic identity. Skerry combines social-science research and astute observation to produce a work worthy of his teachers Nathan Glazer and James Q. Wilson. Ronald Takaki's screed, A Different Mirror, reflects the intellectual poverty but the political force of the multicultural assault on America. Absent a principled response to Professor Takaki's text -- which surely

will receive widespread adoption in university courses--America's future generations, of all ethnic and racial groups, will be left more alienated from their Western roots than ever before.

The thesis of Mexican Americans is encapsulated in the two photos on its dustjacket--one of Texas Mexicans (with a priest prominent) solemnly taking the oath to become American citizens; the other a montage of a rally of mostly young Mexican Americans (one wearing a UCLA Tshirt) chanting, bearing candles, fists raised. By comparing Mexican-American politics in San Antonio and in Los Angeles, Skerry contrasts two sharply different ways Mexican Americans understand themselves. The Mexican Americans of San Antonio practice a traditional version of ethnic politics, like that of other white ethnic groups, while their Los Angeles counterparts emphasize their separate status as a race, in order to extort the benefits of redistributive politics.

In brief, Skerry concludes that there is no necessity that Mexican Americans segregate themselves from American society; America can absorb them the same way it has absorbed other immigrants throughout our history. Here the San Antonio example of local self-government and civic involvement provides an emphatic--though perhaps unique example. However, powerful forces are weakening America's capacity to absorb. The principal disruptive force is not, say, the proximity of Mexico; rather, it is the style of coalition politics practiced by MexicanAmerican politicians (especially in Los Angeles), a politics that makes alliances with black and other liberal politicians. "Parachuted" into safe seats in reapportioned local and congressional districts (as ordered in some cases by the Reagan Justice Department), the L.A. Mexican politicos not only lack but actually shun roots in their "communities." Hence, they actually oppose voter-registration efforts. Indeed, Los Angeles politicians avoid contact with parish churches precisely because they don't wish, Skerry quotes, to "run the risk of stirring up the right-to-lifers." Thus, although the majority of Mexican Americans are anti-abortion, Mexican-American politicians are typically pro-abortion.

Here Skerry's insights raise some uncomfortable questions about the multi-ethnic future of America. Is San Antonio merely a symbol of a fading past? Support for bilingual education unites Mexican-American politicians with other Hispanics, despite strong equivocation by the rank-and-file. Furthermore, one should view this disjunction between popular and elite opinion in national perspective. Congressional grants corrupt local self-government, which becomes more dependent on Washington and increasingly tied to the national ethnic leadership rather than to the grassroots organizations (such as churches) or the unorganized rank-and-file. It should be noted that Skerry's analysis of Mexican-American elites also applies perfectly to virtually all Asian-American groups, whose leaders are lapdogs of the Left, even though majorities of Asian Americans voted for Reagan and Bush.

Moreover, non-governmental elites (such as the Ford Foundation) impede the Americanization of Mexicans by subsidizing the racial-minority model. Most important of all in making Mexican Americans racially conscious is higher education, as students are "born again at Berkeley."

A rising figure in the academy's war on liberal education and full citizenship is Berkeley ethnic-studies professor Ronald Takaki. From his sometimes useful (and thoroughly polemical) study of nineteenth-century Americans' view of race, Iron Cages (1979), Takaki has deteriorated as a scholar. He now produces books that are merely polemical, and with only partisan political usefulness.

A Different Mirror synthesizes Takaki's previous books on black and Asian-American history and adds Indians, Irish, Jews, and "Chicanos" (that term from the Sixties for Mexican Americans). All have been exploited, Professor Takald explains, though the Africans who were imported for slavery were exploited to a much greater degree. Capitalism and what passes for democracy have so abused these disparate (and often clashing) groups that they should look to each other for "connectedness," in "working-class solidarity." Such a comparison distorts, for one, the experiences of his fellow Asian Americans, who have won prosperity by rules which are now being changed to their disadvantage.

To cite just one telling example of his vulgar reading of American history: contending that America has always been a society fundamentally hostile to non-whites, Professor Takaki cites Benjamin Franklin: "Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawnys, of increasing the lovely white?" It evidently never occurred to Takaki that Franklin was using an aesthetic judgment to make an argument against importing slaves, whose presence would undermine American republicanism. After all, the character (not the color) of a nation's immigrants is always of concern, particularly for a nation attempting to establish self-government.

But for Takaki the American Founding was not a world-historic attempt to make a universal principle (human equality) the basis for a particular nation, but rather an excuse and precondition for "economic acquisition and expansion."

Of course, none of this criticism of Takaki is to deny that American racial and ethnic minorities have often been treated unjustly. But others have told that story much better. For books on Asian Americans, try those by Roger Daniels (liberal but fair) or the popular works by Bill Hosokawa. For African Americans, the anthology edited by Howard Brotz; for Mexican and Hispanic Americans, Richard Rodriguez's essays, Linda Chavez's Out of the Barrio, and of course Peter Skerrifs work. Finally, as general books, Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America and Stephan Thernstrom's massive Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Among Asian Americans alone, there are numerous conservatives who could counter Takaki, who appears on TV as an Asian-American spokesman. These more calmly reflective souls include a true scholar, historian Reed Ueda of Tufts; journalists such as Lance Izumi of the Claremont Institute and Arthur Hu of Asian Week; and numerous economists and political scientists.

The superiority of the West to other cultures lies partly in its unique ability to engage in rational self-criticism, while avoiding self-flagellation. Although I would say that slavery is the central political and moral issue in American political history, it does not follow that the experiences of all minority groups are best understood in the light of slavery. An insightful multicultural history would have the dignity of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather's tale of the civilizing of the Southwest, rather than the ranting of a Marxist tract or a deconstructed classic. It would reflect the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, who saw the genius of America in its ability to achieve the peak of Western civilization, in which strangers, who might formerly have attempted to enslave others, become friends.