PROF. SCOTT KURASHIGE TO DISCUSS 'SHIFTING GROUNDS OF RACE' ON SATURDAY, JULY 30

Professor Scott Kurashige will provide insight into his book, Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, at a public program set for the Japanese American National Museum on Saturday, July 30, beginning at 2 p.m.

Among Professor Kurashige’s insights is the fact that Los Angeles, now considered one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the world, had the smallest proportion of immigrants (only eight percent) of any major U.S. city in 1960. In forty years, that changed dramatically as a population of 3.7 million was broken down as 30 percent white, 10 percent Black, 10 percent Asian and almost half Latino.

Moreover, the pre-1960 era contained a complicated relationship between Asian immigrants and their families and Blacks who migrated from the South. The groups were at times neighbors, rivals, and even political allies. Kurashige demonstrates why African Americans and Japanese Americans joined forces in the battle against discrimination and why the trajectories of the two groups diverged.

In tracing back local history to the 1920s, Kurashige explains how both groups were excluded from the mainstream White society, which is also how many of them became neighbors. An interesting point of intersection between the groups was the Communist Party, which espoused equality for all, and which had a Japanese section of 200 members. Kurashige notes that both groups were "roughly equal targets of degradation by whites."

Separation between Blacks and Japanese Americans was heightened by the war and the U.S. government’s forced removal of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry from their homes and businesses. Kurashige could find only one Black newspaper that challenged the mass incarceration and neither the American Communist Party nor the national ACLU protested the unlawful actions.

Matters shift once more in the post-war, when Japanese Americans return to the West Coast and Los Angeles. Little Tokyo, which had become Bronzeville as Blacks from the South migrated west looking for work, slowly became the center of the Japanese American community again. A movement to integrate the Japanese American population was "public recognition that the Nisei were even potentially capable of assimilation (and) represented a paradigm shift." This led to Japanese Americans being held up as the “model minority” and a changing of positions in society.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Kurashige’s book is his observation of the post-war Crenshaw district. Japanese Americans were building the area into the "new Little Tokyo" and Blacks, whites and Nikkei were all living together when the aftermath of the Watts riots saw the looting of JA businesses around Crenshaw Square. While a local homeowners group tried to encourage better relations, both Japanese Americans and whites moved away. The disappearance of JAs is symbolized by the closing the Holiday Bowl.

Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of history, American culture, and Asian/Pacific Islander American studies at the University of Michigan. He has researched and written numerous articles on Asian American history and Black history. He earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2000.

This program is free to National Museum members or with admission.