Posted on 06/01/2009 12:26:21 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Ronald Takaki, who made it his life’s work to rewrite American history to include Asian-Americans and other ethnic groups excluded from traditional accounts and who helped start the first doctoral program in ethnic studies in the United States, died Tuesday in his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 70.
The cause was suicide, said his son Troy. He battled multiple sclerosis for years. “He struggled, and then he gave up,” his son said.
Mr. Takaki, whose Japanese grandfather immigrated to Hawaii in the 19th century and worked on a sugarcane plantation, became a leading scholar of ethnicity and multiculturalism in works that challenged ethnic stereotypes and chronicled struggles of non-European immigrants.
His works like “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America” (1993) became seminal texts in emerging fields that he helped institutionalize by establishing a doctoral program in ethnic studies in 1984 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 30 years.
...
At U.C.L.A., Mr. Takaki taught the university’s first black-history course, created in response to the Watts riots. When a student asked what revolutionary tools he would be teaching, Mr. Takaki said: “We’re going to strengthen our critical thinking and our writing skills. These can be revolutionary tools if we make them so.”
In 1971 he became the first full-time teacher in Berkeley’s new ethnic studies department, where he taught a highly influential survey course that took a comparative approach in describing racism as experienced by different ethnic groups in the United States. In addition to helping establish the graduate program in ethnic studies, he helped put in place the requirement that all undergraduates take a course intended to broaden their understanding of racial and ethnic diversity. He retired in 2003.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
He does sound like one of the many professors who have transformed American education into indoctrination in multiculturalism (along with feminism, socialism, and environmentalism). Requiring all students to take an "ethnic studies" course -- ugh.
Dude, after you're born, you're supposed to grow up. RIP.
I’m sorry that Takaki suffered and feel for his family now but he wasn’t much of a scholar. We were forced to read his awful textbook, Iron cages: race and culture in nineteenth-century America, in grad school. May he rest in peace.
RIP.
blah, blah, blah - my grandfather emmigrated to the USA in the 19th century and worked shovelling grain for $1 day. Big deal.
Did the newspaper have enough obituaris for Black Americans and Hispanic Americans before they posted the obituary on thsi Asian American?
I wonder if St. Peter uses quotas???
I mourn the loss of a fellow member of the human family. Still, the question begs to be asked, why is atheism such a common thread in those who kill themselves? This archetypal trend of “self as god” reeks of disappointment. The list of godless, anti-family, anti-tradition, intellectual narcissists who end their grand “thesis” with suicide is staggering.
A glimpse at the Holy Bible, (chronicle of human history & the human condition) gives it to us short and sweet, “Pride (the act of unbelief in a power greater than self) goes before destruction, and an haughty spirit (so called, “Intellectual elite”) before a fall. Proverbs 16-18. KJV.
It is appears that like so many before him, Takaki’s false idols he set up for himself, combined with an ungodly reaction to pain were the end of him. In all honesty, I wish him peace and release from suffering and hope he humbled himself to an higher power before taking his own life. My sincere sympathy to those have to live with his decision.
It must be said that if Takaki is the “father of race studies” he is also the father of the dissolution of the unity in the United States. That dread self-serving hyphen he put before the word American, (Afro-, Asian-, Native-, etc...) is the very undoing of “E pluribus unum”.
As divisive as the civil-war itself. The diversity we share could have happened no where but here. How common for a so called “intellectual” to entirely miss the fact that since its inception, America has been the most multi-culty nation in history. The very nation responsible for the advancement of “people’s of color”. Not a word about North Korea and the rest of the genocide in homogenous world cultures.
To bite the hand of the wester civilized forefathers who paved the way for the leftists to have liberty is the lowest of insults. America is not perfect, it is a gift from God and the hyphenating of our people will soon be the end of us.
The left: Indoctrinated intelligence and not an ounce of wisdom.
I think this guy was an Asian BLACK PANTHER. I’m not kidding.
Suicide, it figures. Those obsessed with their minority racial, gender, etc. status tend to be pretty unhappy in general.
“We’re going to strengthen our critical thinking and our writing skills. These can be revolutionary tools if we make them so.”
That aside, condolenses to the family and friends. It’s difficult to lose a loved one.
I live in Berkeley. I do just fine. =)
Pity...
I can't imagine the talks are very good, but those are great titles.
Who is that?
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