What are the themes of A Different Mirror?

A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki has several themes, including:

• that America has a multicultural heritage that is largely unacknowledged by history


• that the same tactics used against the Native Americans were later employed against people of other races and cultures


• and that different groups were used against each other to benefit the ruling class.

Each theme contributes to Takaki's overall message that America is a melting pot of cultures and people, each of which contributed to the country and all of which is largely ignored in traditional history classes.

Takaki begins A Different Mirror by explaining how non-European cultures' contributions to America have largely been ignored. He says that facts that paint the European-majority ruling class in a negative light were left out of the history books and that this removes much of the history of the other people who participated in American culture. He writes his own alternate history that details colonization by Europeans, the struggle of Native Americans, the history of African Americans, and the stories of many other large cultural groups that contributed to the United States.

He also describes in detail how the attacks used to make people afraid of Native Americans were later employed against other groups. For example, Native Americans were described as uneducated. So were African Americans, the Irish, Mexican people, and Eastern Europeans. Each time, this narrative was utilized to keep people in those groups from integrating into the culture and power structure.

Other common negative narratives centered on stigmatizing different cultural practices and religions and painting other groups as violent or dangerous.

Finally, Takaki discusses different times throughout the book that the ruling class has suppressed people of other races or cultures. For example, he says that Thomas Jefferson would be outwardly friendly to Native American groups who weren't violent toward white Americans. At the same time, he was working to turn them into farmers who followed the same culture as the ruling class. Takaki writes that "in blaming the Indians for their own decline, Jefferson insisted that the transfer of Indian lands to whites had been done fairly and legally" (46). This shows one way that the ruling class of white Europeans took large amounts of land, which translated to having more power.

He also discusses how strikes were broken when owners of factories later pitted black workers against the white workers. A company representative distributed 20,000 pamphlets warning black workers to not join white labor unions—playing the two against each other. The only group this benefitted was the group that managed the companies where these people worked.