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.
