Despite the contentious status of Ethnic Studies at the University, students, faculty members and administrators packed into Science Center 150 on Wednesday evening to hear Professor Ron Takaki speak.
One of the leading voices in the field of Ethnic Studies, Takaki helped to found the Ethnic Studies department at the University of California Berkeley, where he has taught for the past 30 years.
Anna Pinkert ’06, the organizer of the lecture, garnered a deep respect for Takaki’s work after reading his book “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America” in high school. After deciding to major in American Studies at Wesleyan, she became involved with other students who hope to provide a more formal setting for Ethnic Studies here.
She contacted Takaki in the beginning of the academic year and was shocked that such a prestigious academic responded to her e-mail asking him to come to speak, she said. Pinkert said she hoped that Takaki’s lecture would help to re-invigorate students’ efforts to begin an Ethnic Studies department at Wesleyan.
Takaki praised the student impetus for his visit.
“What you and your fellow students have demonstrated, is that students have agency,” he said. “The capacity to make decisions and carry things out.”
The grandson of Japanese immigrants, Takaki grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii and claims that he initially was uninterested in academics, but rather focused his energies on surfing.
During his senior year of high school Takaki had a teacher who had earned a PhD, the first non-medical doctor he had ever met. The teacher encouraged Takaki to apply to Wooster College in Ohio and influenced his interest in epistemology.
“I’m going to give you a working definition of ‘epistemology,’” he said. “It means: How do we know what we know we know?”
At Wooster, Takaki said that he felt out of place and separate from the rest of the student population. Though born in the United States and a native speaker of English, classmates often asked him when he had moved to America and when he had learned English.
“I didn’t look American to them and I didn’t have an American sounding name,” he said.
Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Takaki got involved with the civil rights movement and after the “freedom summer” of 1964 decided to study the origins of racial hatred for his graduate dissertation.
Takaki’s insecurities about his status as a racial minority followed him even after he received his Ph.D. He was hired in 1966 to teach the first Black history course ever offered at University of California, Los Angeles. Takaki joked about the awkwardness he felt.
“The first day of class when I walked out in front of the students I could almost hear them thinking, ‘Funny, doesn’t look black,’” he said.
Before leaving UCLA, Takaki helped the Black Student Union to organize and began teaching a class called “Racial Attitudes in America,” which took a comparative look at American race relations.
After being fired from UCLA, in 1972 administrators at the University of California, Berkley hired Takaki to teach in the newly formed Ethnic Studies department.
At Berkeley, Takaki witnessed the racial hostilities at the university and students’ successful attempts in 1989 to create an Ethnic Studies graduation requirement. Currently, 225 courses in over 20 departments at Berkeley fulfill this requirement.
“Imagine how this has transformed the curriculum at Berkeley,” he said.
According to Takaki, Ethnic Studies helps to clear up historical inaccuracies that are a part of what he called “the master historical narrative.”
“Today, that master historical narrative is being challenged by ethnography,” he said.
To illustrate his point, Takaki held an interactive 20-minute lecture within a lecture using Irish and Chinese immigration during the nineteenth century from the perspective of women as his example. This lecture revealed commonly held but incorrect beliefs, such as the perception that most Irish immigrants arrived in America during the potato famine. Takaki indicated more plausible reasons and also accounted for less visible groups, such as Chinese women in America, and the role they played in Chinese immigrant dynamics.
“[When looking at their histories] I think of these people as men and women with minds and wills and voices,” he said. “They are telling us about their hopes and dreams of becoming American and telling us what it means to be American.”
In their questions after the lecture, many students used Takaki’s expertise to speak directly to administrators present in the hope of influencing them to support the initiative to create an Ethnic Studies department at Wesleyan. Among other issues, Takaki explained that, according to current census reports, by 2050 there would no longer be a single racial majority; rather all Americans will belong to a racial minority. According to Takaki, this fact suggests the importance of Ethnic Studies to understand the world we live in as well as the world we will inhabit in the future.
“I think it’s important that Ron Takaki came to Wesleyan,” said Una Osato ’04, an American Studies major who has been working towards starting an Ethnic Studies Department at the University. “It’s really important to have academics who have been fighting for ethnic studies and have been successful to give us support. It’s a live battle that has been successful at other schools.”
Though Osato was pleased with the turnout, she felt President Bennet’s absence was a strong indication that the Administration still has not taken the issue seriously.
When leaving, many students seemed perplexed at the lack of an Ethnic Studies department at Wesleyan.
“I think it’s a really big contradiction that we’re Diversity University and we haven’t developed that,” said Dan Manso ’06.
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