Summary Of A Different Mirror By Ronald Takaki

Before reading A DIFFERENT MIRROR by Ronald Takaki, the title probably illustrates an issue about images of people and where they come from, but what sets them alike is being human and the blood flowing though their veins. The book starts off of with Takaki going to Norfolk for a multiculturalism conference. He first starts off talking to taxi man who questions him ‘“How long have you been in this country?”’ and he answers “All my life” (1). Takaki gives the taxi man a preview about how he came to live here in the United States. Based off of that conversation, it seems that the taxi man who is in his late forties thought that he was not born in America due to his appearance. He judge Takaki as one who couldn’t understand nor speak english that well. In response humans shouldn't judge a book by its cover. The taxi man judged him as one who isn’t from the United States and couldn’t speak. At this point he realized that there was an “uncomfortably conscious of a racial” division ( Takaki 1).

In addition to Takaki and the taxi man’s conversation, it led to him telling the readers about what he read and found out about the “whites.” He states “In 1990, Time published a cover story on ‘American’s Changing Color.’ ‘Someday soon,’ the magazine announced, ‘White Americans will become a minority’” (Takaki 2).

When he mentioned about this magazine, it illustrated how the United States isn’t a land thats filled with “white” supremacy, but who are considered to be part of the generation as a minority. In America, people set their mindset as if white were the one who discovered America, and were the one to set land

here.
Moreover, when we take it back centuries ago, Columbus wasn’t the first to land in American, but probably the first to set sea into America. The real Americans who first set their feet in American soil were the Native Americans. They are the true Americans who were born and raised here. Takaki then elicits “ we approach the time when whites become a minority, many of us are perplexed about our national identity and our future as one people” (3). As an American, who’s ethnicity isn’t American born, people would agree that the whites are not the ones who are born here, based off what their nationality. What makes humans as “one people” is the unity of minorities coming together and saying this is their home.
Likewise to uncovering the dirt about whites not being the first to be raised and born in the United States, Takaki talks about the incident about Rodney King and the shooting and how humans are at a war of multiculturalism. Takaki illustrates the lesson of “Los Angeles explosion” and the “recognition of the fact that we are a multiracial society and that race can no longer be defined in the binary terms of white and black. ‘We’ will have to include Hispanics and Asians” (5). He tries to inform his readers that humans are naturally born to judge other races; and how humans have to accept the fact that there are more than just a binary term in race, it’s a multiple term in race, because of immigration of foreign born and their fornication in creating an American born child. America is a melting pot of different ethnicities. Takaki wants to inform his readers with articles and issues that are troubling Americans with ethnic background and controversy. Overall, it was great to read chapter one of Takaki’s writing. At the end of the reading the title of the book did illustrate about different ethnicity and the troubles that people face. What people share is being human and having a pumping heart, but what sets them apart is the nationality of oneself and thats why the title is called, A DIFFERENT MIRROR.