![]() If that was the goal, I think this book misses the mark. It seems one intent for this book was to educate people like this taxi driver. In the book's foreword the author (of Japanese ancestry and born in the US with several generations in the US) was asked by a white taxi driver how long he had been in this country and he was told that his English was excellent. Every American should know, and understand, the inequities suffered by minorities, but this should be understood within a broad context. I thus felt this was less compelling than the best of histories. In this book, the history is not integrated, it focuses largely on the inequities suffered by minorities, instead of a broad swath including the inequities along with the many scientific, technical, cultural, artistic, and political contributions of minorities. Most of this material was covered back then, and covered in a more integrated way. Perhaps, once upon a time, the history of minorities in the US was not covered in K-12 histories, but for decades (at least in California where I graduated high school in 1976) this has no longer been the case. This (like all histories) distorts in its own way. This is book attempts to look at US history through a different mirror by focusing upon the history of various minorities. ![]()
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