A Different Mirror Quotes

“I believe our education system as a whole has not integrated the histories of all people into our education system, just the Eurocentric view of itself, and the White-centered view of African Americans, and even this is slim to nonexistent. What I find is that most people don't know the fact they don't know, because of the complete lack of information.”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America

“the study of diversity is essential for understanding how and why America became what Walt Whitman called a “teeming nation of nations.”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror

“Jefferson exploded with guilt: “The torment of mind, I will endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror

“      The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror

“What I find is that most people don’t know the fact that they don’t know, because of the complete lack of information.”4”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror

“War is our only recourse. There is no other remedy.”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror

“War exists notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it.”8”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror

“In 1852, of the 11,794 Chinese in California, only seven were women.”
― Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror