Takaki defined my first semester at Berkeley. He seemed to guest speak in every class I had. He would tell jokes about his time as a surfer in Hawaii and his seemingly accidental road to academia. And every time, he would ask about epistemology, "how we know that we know what we know".
Still, the best speech I heard him give was at a rally on Sproul in support of undocumented immigrants. He was largely unscripted, and gave a picture of undocumented immigration that made it everyone's struggle. He was more lively and passionate than I had seen him in the classroom.
One of my friends calls Takaki his 'intellectual grandfather' because he read Strangers From a Different Shore in the seventh grade. Reading about the American immigration story from an Asian American perspective changed the way he thought about history.
He was the father of radical multiculturalism. One that didn't just recognize difference in the face of colorblindness, but an anti-racist multiculturalism that recognized the injustices of the past and applied that history to the injustices of the present.
Rest in power, Ron Takaki.
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