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    The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles
    The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles
    The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles
    Ebook340 pages9 hours

    The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles

    By Scott Kurashige

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    Los Angeles has attracted intense attention as a "world city" characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. Yet, little is known about the historical transformation of a place whose leaders proudly proclaimed themselves white supremacists less than a century ago. In The Shifting Grounds of Race, Scott Kurashige highlights the role African Americans and Japanese Americans played in the social and political struggles that remade twentieth-century Los Angeles.


    Linking paradigmatic events like Japanese American internment and the Black civil rights movement, Kurashige transcends the usual "black/white" dichotomy to explore the multiethnic dimensions of segregation and integration. Racism and sprawl shaped the dominant image of Los Angeles as a "white city." But they simultaneously fostered a shared oppositional consciousness among Black and Japanese Americans living as neighbors within diverse urban communities.


    Kurashige demonstrates why African Americans and Japanese Americans joined forces in the battle against discrimination and why the trajectories of the two groups diverged. Connecting local developments to national and international concerns, he reveals how critical shifts in postwar politics were shaped by a multiracial discourse that promoted the acceptance of Japanese Americans as a "model minority" while binding African Americans to the social ills underlying the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Multicultural Los Angeles ultimately encompassed both the new prosperity arising from transpacific commerce and the enduring problem of race and class divisions.


    This extraordinarily ambitious book adds new depth and complexity to our understanding of the "urban crisis" and offers a window into America's multiethnic future.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2010
    ISBN9781400834006
    The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles
    Author

    Scott Kurashige

    Scott Kurashige is Professor of American and Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and coauthor with Grace Lee Boggs of The Next American Revolution.

    Read more from Scott Kurashige

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    • 5/5
      Triangulation in Los AngelesBravo for Scott Kurashige, professor of History at University of Michigan, for delivering this highly nuanced history of race relations and struggle for racial justice from both the black and Japanese communities in the interwar period, WWII and through the interwar period up to the 1965 Watts Riots.In the book, Kurashige attempts to answer the central question of why the racial makeup of Los Angeles was in constant flux from the Great Depression through to the turbulent 60s. Kurashige shows how complex and triangular the relations between the Japanese, black and white communities were and how white hegemony prevailed by playing the Japanese and blacks off of one another; how endemic white racism kept schools and neighborhoods segregated; how migration and internment fundamentally changed entire communities during the WWII period. Postwar Los Angeles saw continued tensions with the return of internees and the emergence of the black urban ghetto in South Central (Crenshaw) resulting from the white flight to the suburbs. The final culmination of conflict erupting in the violence of the Watts riots in 1965.As an Asian, I especially enjoyed learning more about the "dual nationalist" sentiments of Japanese Americans prior to WWII and the "model minority" myth postwar. How Japanese Americans sought both to reassert their "Americanism" while simultaneously proving the competency and equality of the Japanese race with the white race. Ultimately it proved meaningless as white racism disguised as patriotism led a ruthless campaign to drive the "yellow peril" out of Los Angeles and into the internment camps such as Manzanar. Postwar, white racism continued though in a different form, perpetuating the myth of the "model minority". This ideological distortion of Asian immigrant success used to denigrate other minorities became a powerful mechanism by whites to once again, play off the Japanese and black communities off one another.A final discussion on integration and multiculturalism during the Bradley era (LA's first black mayor) shows very much a gilded era of Los Angeles. Optically, race relations appeared to have improved through the cosmopolitanism of Bradley's multicultural policies, yet structurally Los Angeles remained as segregated and unequal as ever before and arguably worse.Though written for the academic reader, Kurashige maintains a conversational tone throughout the book. Having read many of Mike Davis social histories of Los Angeles, "The Shifting Grounds of Race" will certainly expand the breadth of knowledge about the "City of Quartz" especially in the area of Japanese, black and white community relations. Notably absent is detailed discussion about the sizeable Latino communities which Kurashige correctly directs to a number of great histories already written.Overall, "The Shifting Grounds of Race" is highly engaging and a mandatory read for anyone wanting to learn more about the unique history of mosaic diversity that is the City of Los Angeles.

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