A Brief Summary Of Takaki's A Different Mirror

The two readings I decided to connect are the Fredrickson, Models of American Ethnic Relations reading and our book A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki, Chapter Four. In Fredrickson’s reading, they talked about cultural pluralism; in this, they seek to create diversity and want everyone to be included; “cultural pluralists celebrate differences among groups rather than seek to obliterate them” (Fredrickson 6). In the Takaki book, it talks about how President Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson wanted the Native Americans removed. In this quote by Andrew Jackson, he talks about how he has the right to remove Indians and even kill them: “Like the early Pruitans, Jackson affirmed the errand into the wilderness in his justification for Indian removal and even death” (Takaki 82). This shows disagreements
In this, thousands of Native Americans crossed the country in the winter to be moved to different land. Takaki describes the conditions they were forced to move in: “While en route to their new homes, many Choctaws encountered terrible winter storms” (Takaki 85). In another quote from Takaki, he describes how horrible they treated the Indians while moving them: “What struck Tocqueville was how whites were able to deprive Indians of their rights and exterminate them” (Takaki 86). Both of these quotes from Takaki show how the United States was trying to create a new United States without cultural pluralism. While reading Fredrickson, Models of American Ethnic Relations, this helped me understand how people should be treated and how we should be welcoming them and building relationships with people of different cultures. This put the Takaki book into another perspective for me and helped me understand what the message he was trying to portray was. When we first started reading our Takaki book, I viewed it as a history book and didn’t see it in the context of how badly the United States was treating