A Different Mirror

A Different Mirror

by

Ronald Takaki

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Unity vs. Division Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Unity vs. Division Theme Icon
Whiteness and the Other Theme Icon
Labor, Profit, and the Building of the Nation Theme Icon
Segregation vs. Assimilation Theme Icon
Citizenship, Identity, and the American Dream Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Different Mirror, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Unity vs. Division Theme Icon

The most important intervention that A Different Mirror makes lies within Ronald Takaki’s decision to examine a range of different ethnic groups side by side, rather than focusing on one single group. Through this decision, Takaki emphasizes that people of different ethnicities should feel a sense of unity with each other, offering mutual support and solidarity, particularly when it comes to fighting prejudice and discrimination. He outlines the ways in which inter-ethnic tensions serve the interests of those who benefit from white supremacy. In order to reclaim power, people should maintain a strong sense of unity based in common struggle.

While emphasizing the importance of unity, Takaki is clear that there are many reasons why different ethnic groups may naturally feel very dissimilar, alienated, and suspicious of one another. To begin with, the groups he identifies all have very different reasons for being in the US. There is a stark difference, for example, between Native people who are indigenous to North America, African Americans whose ancestors were forcibly brought to the nation, and immigrants such as Irish or Muslim populations who came to escape war and persecution. Furthermore, each of these groups possessed completely different cultures, practiced different faiths, and spoke different languages, such that there was often no possibility even for basic communication between them. Unsurprisingly, this could lead to misunderstanding, distrust, and hostility.

Takaki is also careful to point out that even among ethnic groups that may appear to have a lot in common from an outside perspective, stark differences remained. For example, he emphasizes that prior to colonization, the US was already a richly diverse continent with a huge variety of cultures, languages, and religious practices. Indeed, following the establishment of the US settler colony, there remained significant divides among Native tribes over issues like identification with the US. Where many Navajo served in the Second World War, declaring themselves “proud to be Americans,” members of other tribes furiously rejected that possibility, refusing to serve in the “white man’s war.” Given these stark contrasts between different groups’ relation to the US itself, it is perhaps not surprising that members of these groups can end up feeling little commonality with each other. Moreover, Takaki identifies that where feelings of similarity and solidarity might have existed, they often did not prove very enduring. For example, he argues: “Many Irish saw parallels between themselves as a degraded people and blacks in bondage. In Ireland, they had identified themselves as the ‘slaves’ of the British, and many supported the abolition of slavery in the United States […] But Irish sympathy for black slaves seemed to disappear with the Atlantic crossing. In America, many of them became antiblack.” Examples like this show that even where solidarity might have originally been possible, it can be hard to maintain.

Takaki also identifies ways in which white people systematically worked to turn different ethnic groups against each other in order to maintain white supremacy. (Note that for most of the period the book covers, the category “white” does not include Irish, Jewish, or Southeastern European immigrants.) The white middle- and upper-classes were afraid of what might happen if working-class people formed alliances across ethnic divides. For example, during slavery, it was not uncommon for enslaved black people and white indentured servants to escape together. Fearing these kinds of rebellions, enslavers stoked anti-black racism among white workers, attempting to dissuade them from seeing black people as potential allies. In another example, sugar planters in Hawaii “were systematically developing an ethnically diverse labor force in order to create divisions among their workers and reinforce management control.”

In order to build power, improve conditions, and fight white supremacy, Takaki emphasizes that it is vital that different ethnic groups unite with one another. For example, workers must refuse to serve as “scabs” (strikebreakers) if offered the chance to break the strike of another ethnic group. Even better are examples of when workers of different ethnic groups choose to strike together, such as the Mexican-Japanese strike that took place in Oxnard, California, in 1903. This was the first time in California’s history when two ethnic groups, “feeling a solidarity based on class,” formed a union. Takaki argues that when ethnic groups unite, the elite class realize that they do not have absolute power.

Takaki also identifies moments when, paradoxically, white supremacy inadvertently brings together ethnic groups rather than dividing them. One example of this is the intermarriages that took place between Punjabi Sikh men and Mexican women in California. Punjabi men were barred both from owning land and marrying white women, but were allowed to marry Mexicans, who were themselves permitted to own land. This convergence of different racist laws ended up bringing together these two otherwise very disparate ethnic groups.

Overall, Takaki emphasizes that while different ethnic groups do not need to erase their differences, they do need to act in alliance with one another. Without such solidarity, white supremacy will continue to oppress all those excluded from the category of whiteness.

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Unity vs. Division Quotes in A Different Mirror

Below you will find the important quotes in A Different Mirror related to the theme of Unity vs. Division.
Chapter 1: A Different Mirror Quotes

“Race,” observed Toni Morrison, has functioned as a “metaphor” necessary to the “construction of Americanness”: in the creation of our national identity, “American” has been defined as “white.” Not to be “white” is to be designated as the “Other”—different, inferior, and unassimilable.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2: The “Tempest” in the Wilderness Quotes

This demonization of Indians served complicated ends. The enemy was not only external but also internal. To the Puritans, the Indians were like Caliban, a "born devil": they had failed to control their appetites, to create boundaries separating mind from body. They represented what English men and women in America thought they were not, and, more important—what they must not become. As exiles living in the wilderness far from “civilization,” the Puritans used their negative images of Indians to delineate the moral requirements they had set up for themselves.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker), Caliban
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 3: The Hidden Origins of Slavery Quotes

The planters had come to a crossroads. They could open economic opportunities to white workers and extend political privileges to them, but this would erode their own economic advantage and potentially undermine their political hegemony. Or they could try to reorganize society on the basis of class and race. By importing and buying more slaves, they could reduce their dependency on an armed white labor force and exploit workers from Africa, who could be denied the right to bear arms because of their race.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 6: Fleeing “the Tyrant’s Heel” Quotes

Many Irish saw parallels between themselves as a degraded people and blacks in bondage. In Ireland, they had identified themselves as the "slaves" of the British, and many supported the abolition of slavery in the United States. ln 1842, thousands of them signed a petition that declared: "Irishmen and Irishwomen! treat the colored people as your equals, as brethren." But Irish sympathy for black slaves seemed to disappear with the Atlantic crossing. In America, many of them became antiblack.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:

President Abbott Lawrence Lowell viewed the Irish favorably and highlighted Harvard's role in assimilating them into American society. “What we need,” he had explained earlier, “is not to dominate the Irish but to absorb them. We want them to become rich,” he added, “send their sons to our colleges, and share our prosperity and our sentiments.” In his opinion, however, such inclusionism should be reserved for certain groups. The "theory of universal political equality” he argued, should not be applied to "tribal Indians," "Chinese," or "negroes under all conditions, [but] only to our own race, and to those people whom we can assimilate rapidly." Lowell added that the Irish were unlike Jewish immigrants: they were Christian as well as culturally similar to Americans of English origin. The Irish could, therefore, become "so merged in the American people that they would not be ‘distinguished as a class.’”

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker), Abbott Lawrence Lowell (speaker)
Related Symbols: Harvard University
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 7: “Foreigners in Their Native Land” Quotes

Justifying this racial hierarchy, mine owner Sylvester Mowry invoked the images as well as language used earlier by slavemasters to describe the affection and loyalty of their slaves. "My own experience has taught me that the lower class of Mexicans…,” Mowry declared, “are docile, faithful, good servants, capable of strong attachments when firmly and kindly treated. They have been ‘peons’ for generations. They will always remain so, as it is their natural condition.”

But, like the enslaved blacks of the Old South, Mexican workers demonstrated that they were capable of defying these stereotypes of docility and submissiveness. Demanding self-respect and better wages, they repeatedly went on strike.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Related Symbols: Strikes
Page Number: 173-174
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 8: Searching for Gold Mountain Quotes

What enabled businessmen like Crocker to degrade the Chinese into a subservient laboring caste was the dominant ideology that defined America as a racially homogeneous society and Americans as white. The status of racial inferiority assigned to the Chinese had been prefigured in the black and Indian past.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 10: Pacific Crossings Quotes

Though they imported workers along with supplies, planters were conscious of the nationalities of their laborers. They were systematically developing an ethnically diverse labor force in order to create divisions among their workers and reinforce management control. Complaining about the frequency of strikes on plantations where the workers were mostly from the same country, plantation managers recommended: “Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any, cases of Japs, Chinese, and Portuguese entering into a strike as a unit.”

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Related Symbols: Strikes
Page Number: 237-238
Explanation and Analysis:

In their demand for a higher wage, the strikers explained: "We have decided to permanently settle here, to incorporate ourselves with the body politique [sic] of Hawaii—to unite our destiny with that of Hawaii, sharing the prosperity and adversity of Hawaii with other citizens of Hawaii." Significantly, the Japanese were framing their demands in “American” terms. They argued that the deplorable conditions on the plantations perpetuated an "undemocratic and un-American" society of "plutocrats and coolies." Fair wages would encourage laborers to work more industriously and productively. The goal of the strike was to create "a thriving and contented middle class—the realization of the high ideal of Americanism."

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Related Symbols: Strikes
Page Number: 243
Explanation and Analysis:

“We try hard to be American but Americans always say you always Japanese. Irish become American and all time talk about Ireland; Italians become Americans even if do all time like in Italy; but Japanese can never be anything but Jap.”

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 11: The Exodus from Russia Quotes

Expressions of resentment and ethnic epithets began to circulate: "Jews are an unassimilable race, as dangerous to a college as indigestible food to man." […]

President Abbott Lawrence Lowell announced that the college had a "Jewish problem" and led efforts to curb their enrollment. "It is the duty of Harvard," he wrote privately in a letter to a member of the Board of Overseers on March 29, 1922, "to receive just as many boys who have come, or whose parents have come, to this country without our background as we can effectively educate; including in education the imparting, not only of book knowledge, but of ideas and traditions of our people. Experience seems to place that proportion at about 15%."

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker), Abbott Lawrence Lowell (speaker)
Related Symbols: Harvard University
Page Number: 286
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 12: El Norte Quotes

For many Mexicans, the border was only an imaginary line between Mexico and the United States—one that could be crossed and recrossed at will. Living in El Norte, they created a Mexican-American world called the barrio.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 14: World War II Quotes

In a letter to the NAACP, a soldier wrote: "I am a Negro soldier 22 years old. I won't fight or die in vain. If I fight, suffer or die it will be for the freedom of every black man to live equally with other races." Scheduled to be drafted into the army, a black youth declared: “Just carve on my tombstone, ‘Here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man.’”

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 351
Explanation and Analysis:

“There's one other great incident of humanity that I'm very familiar with, the three hundred years of slavery in my own country, where people for generations were not allowed to be free, subject to the dictates of another race. Held in bondage, forced to work, and forced to do what another person wanted you to do. And if you didn't obey, there were no laws against killing you and destroying your family. So I said, ‘As you talk, I see there's a close parallel between the history of my people in America and what's happened to the Jews in Europe.’”

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki
Page Number: 378
Explanation and Analysis:

“I think one man is as good as another so long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will [Young, the Confederate veteran] says the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

Related Characters: President Harry Truman (speaker), Ronald Takaki
Page Number: 381
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 15: Out of the War Quotes

At a deeper level, the split between Jews and blacks reflected a larger ideological divide, as conflicting visions of equality emerged. The Civil Rights Movement had begun as a struggle for equality for blacks through integration, which was often defined as a condition of equality. To "overcome" meant to integrate the schools, buses, lunch counters, and other public facilities; this goal was expanded to include equality of opportunity for voting and employment. But in 1966, like earlier black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael and other young militant blacks issued a clarion call for Black Power […] Equality, for many black militants, now meant self-determination for blacks as a colonized people in America. The cry of black nationalism was for separatism rather than integration, and there was no place for whites, including Jews, in the movement for black liberation.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker), Marcus Garvey
Page Number: 395
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 16: Again, the “Tempest-Tost” Quotes

Facing a rising nativist backlash against illegal immigrants, many Irish newcomers joined Mexican Americans in demanding comprehensive immigration reform that would enable all of them to become legalized. In February 2006, fifteen hundred Irish participated in an immigration reform rally in San Francisco. One of them, Elaine, worked as a nanny. "We're all in the same boat," she told a reporter. "The Irish are lucky because we speak English and we're white. We do get treated better. But we [undocumented immigrants] are all hard workers. We all want a better life." Elaine explained that she would like to become a legal permanent resident so that she could build a stable life in her adopted country without fear of being picked up by immigration authorities. She also would like to take her six-year-old son to Ireland so he can maintain his ties to his grandparents and his Irish heritage.

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 408
Explanation and Analysis:

Most of the shop signs in Westminster were in Vietnamese only. But the merchants of Little Saigon have begun to reach out for a larger customer market. In some Vietnamese stores, signs announce: "Se habla español.”

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki (speaker)
Page Number: 418
Explanation and Analysis:

“Afghans have integrated instead of assimilated […] Fremont would be a good example. Afghans have managed to keep their culture and identity. It hasn't been lost in the idea of assimilation. That's when you totally and completely become the culture that you have immigrated to and completely lose your people's original identity. Afghans have kept their uniqueness, the beauty of their culture, and at the same time have thoroughly functioned in today's society. I think that's what integration means.”

Related Characters: Ronald Takaki
Page Number: 426
Explanation and Analysis: