[Marxism] Ronald Takaki

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The New York Times, May 31, 2009
Ronald Takaki, a Scholar on Ethnicity, Dies at 70
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Ronald Takaki, who made it his life’s work to rewrite American history 
to include Asian-Americans and other ethnic groups excluded from 
traditional accounts and who helped start the first doctoral program in 
ethnic studies in the United States, died Tuesday in his home in 
Berkeley, Calif. He was 70.

The cause was suicide, said his son Troy. He battled multiple sclerosis 
for years. “He struggled, and then he gave up,” his son said.

Mr. Takaki, whose Japanese grandfather immigrated to Hawaii in the 19th 
century and worked on a sugarcane plantation, became a leading scholar 
of ethnicity and multiculturalism in works that challenged ethnic 
stereotypes and chronicled struggles of non-European immigrants.

His works like “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America” 
(1993) became seminal texts in emerging fields that he helped 
institutionalize by establishing a doctoral program in ethnic studies in 
1984 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 30 
years.

Don T. Nakanishi, the director of the Asian American Studies Center at 
the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Berkeley Web site: 
“Ron Takaki elevated and popularized the study of America’s multiracial 
past and present like no other scholar, and in doing so had an indelible 
impact on a generation of students and researchers across the nation and 
world.”

Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki was born in Honolulu and, in his youth, spent 
most of his time surfing. On the beach, he was known as Ten-Toes Takaki 
for his hang-ten style.

He found his vocation while earning a bachelor’s degree in history at 
the College of Wooster in Ohio. While in Ohio he married Carol Rankin, 
who survives him. Besides his son Troy, of Los Angeles, he is also 
survived by another son, Todd, of El Cerrito, Calif.; a daughter, Dana 
Takaki of Chester, Conn.; a brother, Michael Young of Thousand Oaks, 
Calif.; a sister, Janet Wong of Chatsworth, Calif.; and seven grandchildren.

He continued his education at Berkeley, where he earned a master’s 
degree in 1962 and a doctorate in history in 1967. He was deeply 
influenced by the Free Speech movement at the university and by the 
civil rights struggles in the South. “I was born intellectually and 
politically in Berkeley in the ’60s,” he told The San Francisco 
Chronicle in 2003.

He wrote a dissertation on slavery in the United States and returned to 
the subject in his first book, published in 1971, “A Pro-Slavery 
Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade.”

At U.C.L.A., Mr. Takaki taught the university’s first black-history 
course, created in response to the Watts riots. When a student asked 
what revolutionary tools he would be teaching, Mr. Takaki said: “We’re 
going to strengthen our critical thinking and our writing skills. These 
can be revolutionary tools if we make them so.”

In 1971 he became the first full-time teacher in Berkeley’s new ethnic 
studies department, where he taught a highly influential survey course 
that took a comparative approach in describing racism as experienced by 
different ethnic groups in the United States. In addition to helping 
establish the graduate program in ethnic studies, he helped put in place 
the requirement that all undergraduates take a course intended to 
broaden their understanding of racial and ethnic diversity. He retired 
in 2003.

His many books include “Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century 
America” (1979), “Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian 
Americans” (1989), “Democracy and Race: Asian Americans and World War 
II” (1995) and “Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in 
World War II” (2000).


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